Abstract: Various systems and methods of scheduling media segments of varying display rate, length and/or periodicity on at least one clustered, vertically-striped or horizontally-striped continuous media database volume. With respect to the at least one horizontally-striped database volume, one method includes the steps of: (1) associating a display value with each of the media segments, (2) sorting the media segments in a non-increasing order of value density to obtain an ordered list thereof and (3) building a scheduling tree of the media segments, the scheduling tree having a structure that increases a total display value of the media segments.

Abstract: Descriptive canonical forms of entity types are created by scanning one or more documents in a database of a computer system to identify one or more proper names that appear in the documents as raw names. Each of the raw names has zero or more proper names, zero or more medial substrings, zero or more leading substrings, and zero or more trailing substrings. The raw names of one or more documents are "cleaned" and "split" until certain "cleaning and splitting conditions" are no longer met to obtain a list of clean and split candidate names. Anchor names are selected from the list that unambiguously represent an entity type. The anchor names have one or more entity-type attribute values. Variant names, clean and split candidate names having one or more shared attribute (values) with the anchor name, are combined with the anchor name to create an equivalence group of names that refer to the same entity. A canonical form is generated for the group from a subset of the anchor name attributes.