multilat is a tool for controlled multilateral comparison. See 
http://brettkessler.com/McDonald for a more detailed description of
its theoretical basis and for any auxiliary files and documentation
not found distributed with this README.

The bare minimum needed to run multilat is:

1. A Java Runtime Environment and a SAX parser. This was developed and
   tested with Sun's compiler and library, version 1.4.2 and probably
   requires a version pretty close to that.

2. The multilat.jar file or its contents.

3. At least three data files: a retentions rate file and at least two
   language files to compare. The multilat home pages contains
   examples of the latter.

Currently the system is a bare-bones batch program with no user
interface. Under Linux, a command like the following may work:

java -Dorg.xml.sax.driver=org.apache.xerces.parsers.SAXParser \
    -jar multilat.jar swadesh-retent.xml ANG.xml LAT.xml > output

The program is very very verbose and currently there is no way to
reduce the amount of output. However, the web site contains a copy of
the Perl script splitFiles.pl which will break it into a series of
much smaller XML files, including main.xml, which gives a good
executive overview, The Makefile also contains examples of using
scripts and XSLT files to convert the output to browsable HTML.

Brett Kessler
2004 August