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; and comparing the test phrase to a set of defined phrases, the set of defined phrases representing known titles and stored in a lookup table as normalized phrases, the lookup table including organizational hierarchy information corresponding to each known title 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 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.