README for DiaColloDB ABSTRACT DiaColloDB - diachronic collocation database REQUIREMENTS Perl Modules The following non-core perl modules are required, and should be available from CPAN . DDC::Concordance (formerly ddc-perl) Perl module for DDC client connections. Available from CPAN, or via SVN from DDC::XS (formerly ddc-perl-xs) XS wrappers for DDC query parsing. Available from CPAN, or via SVN from File::Map File::Temp JSON IPC::Run Log::Log4perl LWP::UserAgent For querying external servers via DiaColloDB::Client::http. PDL (optional) Perl Data Language for fast fixed-size numeric data structures, used by the TDF (term-document frequency matrix) relation type. It should still be possible to build, install, and run the DiaColloDB distribution on a system without PDL installed, but use of the the TDF (term x document) matrix relation type will be disabled. PDL::CCS (optional) PDL module for sparse index-encoded matrices, used by the TDF (term-document frequency matrix) relation type. See the caveats under PDL. Tie::File::Indexed For handling large (temporary) arrays during index creation. XML::LibXML (optional) Required for index compilation from TCF or TEI corpus sources. Additional Requirements In order to make use of this module, you will also need either a corpus to index or an existing index to query. See "SUBCLASSES" in DiaColloDB::Document for a list of supported corpus input formats. DESCRIPTION The DiaColloDB package provides a set of object-oriented Perl modules and a command-line utility suite for constructing and querying native diachronic collocation indices with optional inclusion of a DDC server back-end for fine-grained queries. INSTALLATION Issue the following commands to the shell: bash$ cd DiaColloDB-0.01 # (or wherever you unpacked this distribution) bash$ perl Makefile.PL # check requirements, etc. bash$ make # build the module bash$ make test # (optional): test module before installing bash$ make install # install the module on your system See perlmodinstall for details. USAGE Assuming you have a raw text corpus you'd like to access via this module, the following steps will be required: Corpus Annotation and Conversion Your corpus must be tokenized and annotated with whatever word-level attributes and/or document-level metadata you wish to be able to query; in particular document date is required. See "SUBCLASSES" in DiaColloDB::Document for a list of currently supported corpus formats. DiaCollo Index Creation You will need to compile a DiaColloDB index for your corpus. This can be accomplished using the dcdb-create.perl(1) script from this distribution. Command-Line Queries Once you have compiled a local index, you can query it from the command-line using the dcdb-query.perl(1) script from this distribution. (Optional) WWW Wrappers If you want online visualization of a local index, consider installing the DiaColloDB::WWW distribution (available on CPAN) and following the instructions in its README.txt file. SEE ALSO * The DiaColloDB module documentation describes the API of the underlying perl module; when in doubt, look here. * The dcdb-create.perl(1) script can be used to create a DiaColloDB index for a corpus in one of the supported corpus formats. * The dcdb-query.perl(1) script can execute runtime queries over a local DiaColloDB index or a remote web-service via the DiaColloDB::Client interface. * contains a live web-service wrapper for a DiaCollo index over the *Deutsches Textarchiv* corpus of historical German, including a user-oriented help page (in English). * The DiaColloDB::WWW distribution contains scripts and utilities for creating HTTP-based web-services for local DiaCollo indices, including various online visualizations. * The CLARIN-D DiaCollo Showcase at contains a brief example-driven tutorial on using the web-services provided by the DiaColloDB::WWW distribution (in German). AUTHOR Bryan Jurish