NORMALIZATION ENGINE AND METHOD OF REQUESTING A KEY OR PERFORMING AN OPERATION PERTAINING TO AN END POINT

A normalization engine and a method of requesting a key or performing an operation pertaining to an end point. In one embodiment, the normalization engine includes: (1) a data manager configured to receive a request to execute an operation or obtain a key/value pair pertaining to an end point and determine a normalized version of the key in the key/value pair and (2) a normalization mapping repository configured to contain normalization mechanisms, the data manager further configured to employ the normalized version to obtain one of the normalization mechanisms from the normalization mapping repository, carry out the normalization mechanism and employ a data source corresponding to the end point to retrieve a device-specific value corresponding to the normalized version.