Canonical Form for Content Hierarchies

I am still pondering the question how exactly a content hierarchy should be modeled.

In a previous post I mention the possibility to declare authorization facts in a hierarchy. Something is still bugging me. Similar to programming, I think that some informations should be considered as cross-cutting concerns (or aspects). David's Model also has an example where authorization decisions have an impact on the model. This bugs me.

Somewhere there lurks the definition of a canonical representation of a content hierarchy:

"
basic, canonic, canonical: reduced to the simplest and most significant form possible without loss of generality, e.g. "a basic story line"; "a canonical syllable pattern"
..."

This does sound right, doesn't it? A basic form of a content hierarchy should

1. have the ideal relation of breadth vs. depth (ideal for the content model)
   
2. only have the necessary node hierarchies/attributes
   
3. still make sense

Those are non-mathematical requirements. The definition of a "Canonical Form" is interesting: while defining a canonical form via equivalency of a range of objects, it remains unspecific about how and when to define a canonical form:

"...
A canonical form may simply be a convention, or a deep theorem.
..."

The most important part is that other content hierarchies which are equivalent to this normal form are all connectible via an equivalence relation.

So the task at hand is to define a model which can act as a natural representation of the solution domain. As soon as this model is found, enhancements can be defined, while still being equivalent to the canonical form.

Well, still lots of questions open:

• is it possible to define a canonical form for a specific use case (e.g. a blog)? Or would it be on an ad-hoc base?
• what would the added benefit of such a canonical form be? The answer might be that extensions would be made vs. the canonical form. If the canonical form itself changes, it should trigger the changes to the other forms. Or at least depict the consequences the change in the canonical form has to equivalent representations
  

There might be another alternative to attack the problem of "hierarchy purpose overloading": as in programming, cross-cutting concerns might best be attacked by Orthogonalization. But this is another story ...