Karl Dawson, our speaker this evening, describes this evening's presentation this way:

"Alvin Toffler characterized "Revolutionary Wealth" as resting on three pillars: time, space and knowledge. The identification of these particular elements is in no small measure attributable to technology, particularly the internet. "Internet time" is something that we all know about. "The World is Flat" is the standard metaphor for globalization. But, whereas the internet has compressed time and space, knowledge is expanding at an accelerating rate. This is the “information overload” problem that we experience in our daily lives.

"Information overload cannot be solved by search engines alone, since even the most precise search requests still leave us with a lot of information to absorb. We live in a post-Gutenberg world of electronic documents, but where are the post-Gutenberg tools to help us process all this information? There has to be something more than just tag clouds.

"Topicmarks is an example of a new set of tools that will change how we work with information, after the search engines have done their part. For its part, Topicmarks begins by enhancing the reading experience, consigning mundane work to machines so that we can spend more time thinking about what we are reading. Its fundamental premise requires that the user be given greater control over how the content is being presented, so that a variety of personalized reading experiences can be achieved. It is a perspective that gives weight to the subjective and not just the objective nature of knowledge. Here then is an application that allows us to work effectively and efficiently with many documents (and their parts), in effect liberating us from the tyrannical convenience of wikipedia. With Topicmarks, we get to exercise critical thinking, to create opportunities of discovery and innovation from no less a source than the world wide web."

Karl Dawson is the CEO of phiScape AG, a company specializing in distributed computing and data integration in heterogeneous environments, with particular application to digital media and knowledge management systems. Prior to founding phiScape AG in Zürich, Mr. Dawson was CTO of Deltavista, a data broker based in Switzerland which connects large volumes of data from a myriad of public and private sources through sophisticated record linkage. In this position, Mr. Dawson not only designed the software and data architecture, but contributed to key parts of the implementation. Prior to Deltavista, Mr. Dawson was employed at the Amdahl Research Laboratory in Toronto, where he helped to develop a relational database system with an embedded rule-based engine. Before this, Mr. Dawson worked five years at I.P. Sharp and Associates in Toronto, where he was privileged to help engineer the company’s APL interpreter, implementing new language primitives. Mr. Dawson holds university degrees in Mathematics and Computer Science.