1. A method for operating a database to determine an organizational hierarchy from contact data, the database being configured to store the contact data as a plurality of contact records, each contact record having a defined set of entities, including at least a name and a title, comprising: receiving contact data at the database including a phrase representing a title, the phrase having a plurality of terms; converting each term of the phrase to lower case; concatenating the plurality of converted terms using a symbol to separate the terms thereby forming a normalized phrase, then setting a test phrase equal to the normalized phrase; generating one or more sets of defined phrases; and comparing the test phrase to the sets of defined phrases, the sets of defined phrases representing known titles and stored in one or more lookup table as normalized phrases, each of the lookup table including organizational hierarchy information corresponding to each known title and a rank and a weight associated with the organizational hierarchy information; wherein, if the test phrase matches a first phrase in the set of defined phrases, a contact record for the received contact data is updated to include the organizational hierarchy information and the rank and weight corresponding with the matching first phrase in the lookup table; and wherein, if the test phrase does not match any phrase in the set of defined phrases, the test phrase is shortened by removing a term, and the comparison step is repeated with the shortened test phrase.