All over the internet you see lists of thousands of individually produced comments, reviews or testimonials that are solicited from the public about blog posts, articles, companies, products, services, and everything. Typically, along with the review, there is a simple rating system, often indicated by 5 stars; the number of the stars being some type of general average of all stars given from reviewers.

The Canonization process is a collaborative way to enable contributors to collaboratively group these thousands of individually produced comments into "camp position statements". In many cases, a camp statement will already be developed fully describing their experience or belief about a restaurant, product, article, or whatever. In such cases simply joining that camp would be all that would be required. All this would enable far more meaningful and quantitative contributions by fare more people, with significantly less effort by any one individual.

One of the goals of the Canonizer, is to develop a unified world wide canonized reputation system that can be easily used by all these review systems. Each company or product or anything being reviewed will have a globally unique identifier related to a "topic" containing the cononized POV statements and support. This data will be contributed by anyone and open to everyone.

The specification and design of a networked Canonizer node system is being Canonized here:

http://canonizer.com/topic/34/1

We are seeking the input and assistance of all potential companies that would have an interest in utilizing such a canonization system. We seek to make a system able to enhance existing and future systems already implemented by as many companies as possible. To the degree we can get as many companies involved in the canonization of the design and the development of such, the better we will be able to achieve this goal of improving all such systems for all people.

An example of a review system we believe could be significantly improved by integrating a canonizer system is dexknows.com which is owned by R.H. Donnelley. The current dexknows.com review system can be seen on this restaurant listing page for Salt Lake City here:

http://canonizer.com/topic/34/1

As you can see, each restaurant can have many reviews contributed by individuals. Each reviewer also selects from a 1 to 5 star rating system. The average star rating is displayed, but isn't quantitative enough to enable sorting when customers are seeking the highest rated company.

dexknows.com can sort by how close companies are to your location, but having the added ability to also sort according to a quantitative canonized satisfaction score, along with distance would significantly improve a customer's ability to easily find a good place to eat. The side by side comparison page could easily include a canonized POV structure listing the names of various "camps" and the quantitative scores for such camps. The extreme benefit to the customer by having this reputation information being universal, or the same data that is being contributed by many companies, from diverse environments is also clear.

The system described in design topic above includes a networked Canonizer DB system. A company like R.H. Donnelley could instantiate such a Canonizer networked node in their infrastructure. They could configure it so that it would only replicate a subset of the data, such as that contained in the /companies/ name space. In this way, any changes made to this name space outside this node would be replicated into R.H. Donnelley's node. And also any data entered through the dexknows.com system would also replicate out to the rest of the Canonizer network.

Just as anyone working on the Canonizer is being credited with Shares of Canonizer LLC, any company contributing would also receive similar credit for contributions. Although this would likely be in a diminishing returns fashion preventing any one company or person from gaining a significantly dominant position. One of the goals of the Canonizer is to focus on the little guy or company at the grass roots level as a priority.

One may ask, if the Canonizer is going to be an open system, why would a company put forth effort early on to help develop the system, as apposed to just waiting tell the system was fully developed and proven, and then just instantiating an already fully developed and proven Canonizer node into there system, such instantly freely providing them all the reputation data.

Of course being involved in the design and development would ensure the design of the Canonizer reputation system would work to the full advantage of their particular needs, and not have any attributes that would make it particularly difficult for them to utilize within their system. And of course being the first to have a powerful and popular service could be a significant advantage in competitive markets such as the Yellow Pages market.

Also, motivation would come from there being a fee required to host a Canonizer network node and utilizing the reputation information in a companies system. If a company contributed to development early on it would theoretically be possible to earn enough shares that would pay dividends, or increase in value, enough to offset such fees. This would be true since the fees being paid by other companies that did not contribute would be going, equally, to all shares earned by anyone. And there are many other potential sources of Revenue for Canonizer LLC than just such Canonizer node hosting fees. We would hope that it would be possible to earn far more shares than what might be required to compensate for such fees or development costs.

Start of a list of potential target industries / partners we may first contact:

Yellow Pages:

U.S.

dexknows.com
Yellow Book
ATT
Angie's List

Newspapers / Magazines:

U.S.

Salt Lake Tribune
Wired Magazine
L.A. Times

Product Review

U.S.

powerreviews.com
Bazaarvoice.com
Amazon.com

Blog, social networking site engines.

Dating Service sites.