TOP 10 TOOLS 2007
Mark van Harmelen

Mark is an honorary research fellow in the School of Computer Science at Manchester University as well as an independent consultant

Mark's Top 10 Tools as at 30 July 2007

1. Google Search - my gateway to the internet

2. del.icio.us - my knowledge store (highly retrievable for me), a search mechanism for pre-filtered topics, and sometimes a leverage mechanism thanks to my del.icio.us network

3. Firefox - works for me in my internet life, in fact with toolbar customisation it has been my PLE for the last couple of years.

4. Wikipedia - my first stop if I want to learn about something specific, as opposed to find things as a result of a search, I go from particular pages to the external links or related items as a second step

5. e-mail - well here you are, I won't mention any clients particularly but if you must know I use Thunderbirdand an IMAP mail server, and Gmail

6. Photoshop - I make a lot of screen dumps, copies of images for reports and so on, Photoshop helps me admirably

7. Google Groups - helps me run projects with multiple members

8. X1 - desktop search, fast, useful, lets me find things in my file system,, and finds me things I didn't even know I had!

9. MediaWiki - I use it lots in teaching, my own learning, allowing collaboratvie editing, and of course it underpins Wikipedia, which is my fourth choice

10. Framemaker - Weyhey! Why use Word? (Well for the better spelling checker, the outline view sometimes, and mostly because my colleagues use it). But Framemaker is my first choice for serious layout of cross referenced documents or documents with line diagrams.