Patent 8200640 was granted and assigned to Microsoft on June, 2012 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
A system, framework, and algorithms for data deduplication are described. A declarative language, such as a Datalog-type logic language, is provided. Programs in the language describe data to be deduplicated and soft and hard constraints that must/should be satisfied by data deduplicated according to the program. To execute the programs, algorithms for performing graph clustering are described.