Along the lines you suggest, a while ago I took IMDB's ratings and used their emperical cumulative distribution function to "flatten" them into something more u

Along the lines you suggest, a while ago I took IMDB's ratings and used their emperical cumulative distribution function to "flatten" them into something more useful, percentile scores: http://blog.moertel.com/posts/2006-01-17-mining-gold-from-the-internet-movie-database-part-1.html http://blog.moertel.com/posts/2006-01-17-mining-gold-from-th... This was about a decade ago, so I'd expect the resulting decoder ring to be somewhat miscalibrated for today's movie ratings. But the same process would be straightforward to apply to a more up-to-date data set of ratings.