ANN: Kura 1.0 released

Boudewijn Rempt boud@rempt.xs4all.nl
Fri, 2 Feb 2001 00:08:35 +0100 (CET)


                          Kura 1.0 
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I am pleased to announce the first release of Kura.

Kura is a complete, professional system for the handling of
linguistic data, especially fieldwork data from small-corpus
languages. It allows users to enter texts in any language, analyze
those texts and bring the analyzed linguistic facts into relation
with each other. Kura includes both a desktop application for easy
handling of interlinear texts, lexica and other linguistic data,
and a special-purpose webserver for the online presentation of the
analyzed data.

This is the first full release of Kura for Windows and Unix/X11.
Kura is a complex piece of software, dependent upon many runtime
components. Kura will not run without some installation effort.

Kura (both this release and frequent development snapshots) is
available at:

   http://www.xs4all.nl/~bsarempt/linguistics/index.html
   
A sample web-server is available at:

   http://www.valdyas.org:8000
   
Kura runs equally well on both Windows and Unix/X11. For those
who prefer the convenience, Kura is also available on CD, for
$49.95. The CD includes Kura, a sample database, binary versions
of all runtime components for Windows and Linux/i386 and full
source to Kura and all the runtime components (except for Qt
2.2.2 for Windows, which is available in binary form only).


Boudewijn Rempt | boud@rempt.xs4all.nl

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Features

 * Interlinear text editor
 * Interlinear text export
 * xml text import/export
 * text parser
 * Lexicon editor
 * Web-server
 * fully Unicode enabled
 * Unicode character entry application
 * Pinyin character entry application
 * sample configuration database
 * the start of a manual
 * multi-user
 * multi-language
 * network transparent
 * support for standard tagsets
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Requirements
 
Kura uses the following run-time components: MySQL, MySQLdb,
Python, PyQt. For full requirements, please look at the web
address mentioned above. 

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Roadmap

Kura will likely be extended with the following features in the
future:

 * improved interlinear text editor
 * lexicon import/export
 * more text import/export filters
 * more flexible layout management for the presentation of
   interlinear texts (using xml templates)
 * direct printing from the application
 * editable tables of data
 * per-language definition of parsers (both syntax/context and
   morphological parsers)
 * a real manual
 * user-definable keyboard layouts
 * point-and-click keyboard window
 * more flexible webserver document creation
 * freely accessible CVS at Sourceforge.net

And of course numerous bugfixes. I will try to keep Kura
compatible with the runtime components used in this release, for
at least a year.

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License

Kura is free software and distributed under the Python license.
This means that anyone can download and use Kura for free,
anyone can alter Kura to his or her own liking and distribute
the altered version free or for profit. However any changes must
be contributed back to the me, and I have the right to incorporate
those changes in new, free versions of Kura.
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<P><A HREF="http://www.xs4all.nl/~bsarempt/linguistics">Kura 1.0</A>
 - Kura is an application for the analysis and presentation of
   linguistic
 data.  (01-Feb-2001)


Boudewijn Rempt  | http://www.valdyas.org