First install SIONlib; for instructions, see http://www.fz-juelich.de/jsc/sionlib.
To compile and build nestio-tools, just enter
$ python3 setup.py install
The build will generate a dynamic library (.so). Set your PYTHONPATH and LD_LIBRARY_PATH to the directory that contains the generated .so file. Then, launch Python and simply
import nestio
You can process files created by NEST's SIONLogger
as follows:
nestio.Reader("/home/jochen/data.sion")