If something has canonical status, it is accepted as having all the qualities that a thing of its kind should have. Ballard's status as a canonical writer
Belonging to some established official group, especially a book that is part of the accepted canon of the Bible The "canonical" Gospels are Matthew, Mark, Luke and John The "Gospel of Thomas" is a non-canonical gnostic text that was not included in the Bible
A polyhedron is canonical if all of its edges are tangent to a unit sphere (ie it is semi-canonical), and the average of all the points of contact between edge lines and the sphere is the centre of the sphere
(1) Conforming to the general rules for encoding--that is, not compressed, compacted, or in any other form specified by a higher protocol (2) Characteristic of a normative mapping and form of equivalence specified in Chapter 3, Conformance