It is important to carefully look into the functional context where that abstraction is used.

If you are looking for example into System Integration, Data Integration, ETL and so on, not using a canonical format from the beginning, will get you into the type of almost exponential grow in mappings between sources and targets.

https://www.bmc.com/blogs/canonical-data-model/

https://www.enterpriseintegrationpatterns.com/CanonicalDataM...