The OntoNotes DB Tool is implemented in Python, using a MySQL database and Python access routines from the MySQLdb package. Users will need to have Python installed, and if they wish to use any of the code that works with the database they will need MySQL as well.
The tool was designed under Python 2.5, but should work on any later Python 2.x release. Python 3 is not supported, though users working with Python 3 might have success with the official Python 2.x to 3.0 ‘2to3’ converter.
These two dependencies are optional, but recommended. The tool can function in two modes, either reading information from the filesystem or the database. To have the latter mode available, you must have a MySQL database to store the data as well as the MySQLdb Python module. You can download MySQL from http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/ and MySQLdb from http://sourceforge.net/projects/mysql-python.
The version of MySQL that we have tested the OntoNotes DB Tool is version 5.0, but we do not use much of the newly added functionality as of now, and so an earlier version of MySQL will do as well – in case you already have it installed. We would highly recommend using version 4.1 or later as they have better Unicode support. This is quite important, as all the data uses the UTF-8 character encoding.
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Once you have the dependencies installed, we can install the OntoNotes DB Tool. It follows the standard Python module distribution guidelines and uses the Python distutils package. After you have installed the above mentioned dependencies, you can install the OntoNotes DB Tool by running:
$ python setup.py install
See also