Canonical - arealive/Viper GitHub Wiki
In computer science, data that has more than one possible representation can often be canonicalized into a completely unique representation called its canonical form.
In computing, the reduction of data to any kind of canonical form is commonly called data normalization.
For instance, database normalization is the process of organizing the fields and tables of a relational database to minimize redundancy and dependency. In the field of software security, a common vulnerability is unchecked malicious input. The mitigation for this problem is proper input validation. Before input validation may be performed, the input must be normalized, i.e., eliminating encoding (for instance HTML encoding) and reducing the input data to a single common character set.
Other forms of data, typically associated with signal processing (including audio and imaging) or machine learning, can be normalized in order to provide a limited range of values.1