Patent Document ID: 7672971
Application ID: 11356838

Base Claim:
1. A computer-implemented method of identifying duplicate objects in a plurality of objects, the method comprising: generating signatures for two or more objects of the plurality of objects based on facts associated with the two or more objects, wherein the plurality of objects is included in a fact repository, wherein signatures for duplicate objects are identical even if at least some facts associated with the duplicate objects are different, and wherein generating a respective signature for a respective object based on facts associated with the respective object includes: retrieving, from the fact repository, a type value associated with a type attribute of a fact associated with the respective object, wherein the type value categorizes an entity represented by the respective object; selecting an attribute of the fact associated with the respective object based on the type value of the fact; and generating the respective signature based on a value associated with the selected attribute, wherein each of the plurality of objects is associated with one or more facts, each of the one or more facts having a value, and wherein generating the respective signature comprises generating the respective signature for each of the two or more of the plurality of objects by deriving the respective signatures from the value of at least one associated fact of the each of the two or more of the plurality of objects; grouping the two or more objects of the plurality of objects into a plurality of buckets based on the generated signatures, wherein the grouping comprises, responsive to an identifier of an existing bucket being the same as the signature of an object, the object being one of the two or more of the plurality of objects, adding the object to the existing bucket, and otherwise establishing a new bucket including the object, an identifier of the new bucket being same as the signature of the object; applying a matcher to respective pairs of objects in one of the plurality of buckets to determine if the respective pairs of objects are duplicates; and merging one or more of the objects determined by the matcher to be duplicates.

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Claim 3:
3. The method of claim 1 , further comprising: selecting the matcher from a collection of matchers, wherein applying the matcher includes applying the selected matcher to each pair of objects in one of the plurality of buckets to determine if the pair of objects are duplicates.