Abstract As wonderful as they are, new search and computation engines can only do so much to abate the problem of information overload. To achieve more signal and less noise with respect to information, more needs to be done on the pull side of the push-pull spectrum of information access. One part of the solution lies in giving the user more control to create, expand and acquire personal knowledge with the assistance of machines, namely software agents. Human-machine collaboration has several elements: concept maps as knowledge representation, simple and elegant human-machine dialogues, incorporation of external knowledge sources, not the least of which is the collective intelligence of the web. These issues and more will be discussed in the context of a web-based management tool that hopes to change how people interact with the web by using semantic web technologies such as RDF. Karl will also demonstrate Topicmarks, a browser plug-in which helps people do activities related to knowledge management and information extraction in an easy and enjoyable way.
[b]Speaker's Bio [/b] 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.
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