29. The computer usable medium of claim 28 wherein the one or more ideographic elements comprise one or more Chinese, Japanese, Korean or Vietnamese characters.
28. A non-transitory computer usable medium having a computer readable program code tangibly embodied therein, the computer readable program code adapted to be executed by a processor to implement a method for facilitating searching and matching of data, comprising: receiving an input data string including one or more ideographic elements; converting the input data string to a Latin-based input data string; generating one or more input keys based on the Latin-based input data string, including removing any non-space silent element from the input data string to generate a phonetic key; searching, using the one or more input keys, a reference database for one or more candidate records, wherein similar records in the database are indexed by a common lookup key; and if the one or more candidate records are found, determining a match score of the one or more candidate records.