Normalization is the process of organizing data in a database to reduce data redundancy and improve data integrity. It involves separating relations into smaller relations and linking them through relationships. The normal forms, such as first normal form, second normal form, etc. are used to reduce redundancy and anomalies like insertion, update and deletion anomalies. Some key aspects are that first normal form disallows multi-valued attributes and composite attributes. Second normal form eliminates non-prime attributes in relations that depend on part of a composite primary key.