Abstract: Patient records may be maintained in healthcare software systems, and two healthcare software systems may communicate to exchange information about a patient. In one example, one of the systems is a provider-oriented system used by a provider such as a hospital, doctor's office, etc., and the other system is a patient-oriented system that the patient uses to manage his or her healthcare records. The patient and the provider may exchange information to allow the systems to communicate with each other. The provider's system may then receive information from the patient's system. The data provided by the patient's system may be voluminous, and the provider's system may extract specific information from that data, and may place the extracted data in a flat data structure.

Abstract: A media identifier registry for managing metadata records. The registry stores a unique logical identifier for each of the records as well as a base type corresponding to each of the logical identifiers. The base types are representative of the information contained in the respective metadata records for the corresponding logical identifiers. The registry further defines associations between the logical identifiers and base types. Improvements in identifying media content and related information according to the invention permit building a media data warehouse capable of aggregating data from many different sources, uniquely identify the same piece of content from different data providers, in different cultures, and in different physical forms to allow a consistent set of data to be stored and retrieved.

Abstract: A media identifier registry for managing metadata records. The registry stores a unique logical identifier for each of the records as well as a base type corresponding to each of the logical identifiers. The base types are representative of the information contained in the respective metadata records for the corresponding logical identifiers. The registry further defines associations between the logical identifiers and base types. Improvements in identifying media content and related information according to the invention permit building a media data warehouse capable of aggregating data from many different sources, uniquely identify the same piece of content from different data providers, in different cultures, and in different physical forms to allow a consistent set of data to be stored and retrieved.

Abstract: Obtaining metadata for media content. Software according to the invention requests the metadata via a metadata query data structure (MDQ) such as a uniform resource locator and receives metadata in response via a metadata return data structure (MDR). The invention includes namespace identifiers such as WMContentID, WMCollectionID, and WMCollectionGroupID for instance-specific associations between media content and metadata. The invention also includes namespace identifiers such as WMPrimaryClassID and WMSecondaryClassID to classify the media content.