Patent ID: 8554750

Claim:
A computer system including instructions tangibly embodied on a non-transitory computer useable medium, and executable by at least one processor, the system comprising: one or more knowledge bases configured to store one or more normalization rules; and a normalization engine in communication with the knowledge bases and configured to cause the at least one processor to: select one or more Configuration Items (CIs) from one or more external data providers to be automatically normalized including identifying one or more duplicate CIs from the one or more external data providers through a discovery process; after selecting the one or more CIs to be automatically normalized, select one or more normalization rules from the one or more knowledge bases; after selecting the one or more normalization rules from the one or more knowledge bases, apply the one or more selected normalization rules to the one or more selected CIs to determine if there are any inconsistencies between the one or more selected CIs and the one or more selected normalization rules; and for at least one of the one or more selected CIs, when there is an inconsistency determined between the one or more selected CIs and the one or more selected normalization rules, automatically normalize incoming data related to the one or more selected CIs from the one or more external data providers by taking an appropriate remedial action including cleaning the incoming data to remove the inconsistency and reconcile the one or more duplicate CIs before storing the at least one of the one or more selected CIs in a data repository.