US Patent 9436718 Systems and methods of generating and using a bitmap index

Systems and methods of generating and using a bitmap index are disclosed. The bitmap index stores bit strings. In a particular implementation, each bit string in the bitmap index corresponds to an attribute of an audience. Each location in each bit string corresponds to the same audience member. The bitmap index supports parallelized and distributed execution of queries with respect to data indexed by the bitmap index. For example, the described bitmap index can be used to index advertising data, healthcare data, financial data, etc.