1. In a computing environment which processes messages, and wherein the message processing is based on one or more characteristics of each message derived from different classes of information formatted differently from one another, one class of information being information contained within the message itself, and another class of information being other information external to the message, a computer-implemented method of deriving one or more unitless characteristics of a message to facilitate processing the message based on the derived one or more characteristics, wherein the method comprises performing at a processor, the following: receiving a first value, the first value associated with a first message, comprising information contained within the message, and representing a specific first unit; receiving a second value associated with the first message, comprising information from a source external to the message, and representing a specific second unit which is different from the specific first unit; receiving one or more queries, the queries specifying at least the first and second received values; at a characteristic computation module configured to compute one or more characteristics for a message from intermediate results, using the one or more queries to process the first and second values to create one or more normalized characteristics for the first message, the one or more normalized characteristics for the first message being in a unitless format which is the same format irrespective of the format of the first and second values and irrespective of the specific units of the first and second values, at least one of the created one or more normalized characteristics being a unitless number representing a globally unique identifier; processing the first message based on at least one of the one or more of the derived normalized characteristics; and storing within the computing environment the one or more normalized characteristics derived for the first message; and processing within the computing environment a second message based on at least one of the one or more of the stored normalized characteristics derived for the first message.