Canvas Helpers

A working library of canvases for strategic planning, semantic modelling, data governance, and AI delivery — designed to integrate with CaseTalk and the architectural work around it. Free to use, as a thank you to the architects and modellers who care about getting meaning right, and as a tribute to the original authors behind each canvas.

The canvases are grouped here by where they sit in a typical journey: Why the work exists, Who is involved, What the subject matter actually is, and How the resulting model is delivered, governed, and put to use.

Start anywhere — or open the Cross Canvas for an overview page that ties them all together.

Why — strategic framing

Why does this work exist? Who is it for, and what value is it meant to create?

These are the canvases you reach for before any modelling begins, to scope the business reason a model is needed in the first place. Most projects don't start here, but the work downstream is harder to justify, and easier to misalign, when these aren't somewhere in the picture.

• Business Model Canvas
  Osterwalder & Pigneur (CC BY-SA 3.0, Strategyzer). Nine-block business model: Key Partners, Activities, Resources, Value Propositions, Customer Relationships, Channels, Segments, Cost Structure, and Revenue Streams.
• Lean Canvas
  Ash Maurya (CC BY-SA 3.0, LeanStack). Startup-focused adaptation with Problem, Solution, Key Metrics, Unique Value Proposition, Unfair Advantage, Channels, Customer Segments, Costs, and Revenue.
• Value Proposition Canvas
  Osterwalder et al. (CC BY-SA 3.0, Strategyzer). Maps Products & Services, Gain Creators, and Pain Relievers against Customer Jobs, Gains, and Pains.
• Wardley Map
  Simon Wardley (CC BY-SA 4.0). Strategic evolution mapping — position components along the value chain and evolution axes.
• Model Value Canvas
  Valle, Sales, Guerra, Santos, Proper & Guizzardi (CAiSE 2025). Decision-support canvas built on the Common Ontology of Value and Risk (COVER): Stakeholder Profile, Solution Value & Risk Map, Resource Value & Risk Map, with FIT indicators. "Use this to make the case for the modelling effort itself."

Who — organisation and capability

Who is accountable, what is the organisation able to do, and who is being served?

Three canvases that situate the work — inside the organisation that owns it, and around the people it's meant to serve. Useful when modelling cuts across departments, when capability gaps need to be made visible before they get confused with modelling problems, or when the customer perspective risks being implicit rather than examined.

• Organogram
  CaseTalk Original. The organization, a work structure breakdown, departments and subdepartments, roles, and people.
• Empathy Map Canvas
  Dave Gray / XPLANE (gamestorming.com). Six quadrants — Thinks, Says, Does, Feels, Pains, and Gains — for persona development.
• Business Capability Map
  BIZBOK (Business Architecture Guild). Hierarchical capability mapping with maturity levels (1-5) and priority ratings. Hierarchy and Grid views.

What — domain discovery and the semantic core

What is actually going on in the business, and what does it all mean?

This is where the modelling work begins. The first three canvases surface the raw material — the verbs, the nouns, and the questions the model must be able to answer. The fourth is the spine of everything CaseTalk does: the formal, fact-oriented model that downstream products, governance frameworks, and AI workloads all derive from.

• EventStorming Board
  Alberto Brandolini (2013). Interactive sticky-note board for Domain Events, Commands, Actors, Aggregates, Policies, Read Models, External Systems, and Hotspots. Grouped and Timeline views.
• CBC-List & NBR Canvas
  Object Type Canvas with Event, Person, Place, Thing, and Context categories plus NBR classifications.
• BEAM Canvas
  Business Event Analysis & Modeling (BEAM) canvas for agile dimensional data warehouse design. Captures business events using the 7W framework: When, How, Who, How Many, Where, What, Why. Inspired by The Business Model Canvas (strategyzer.com). Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License by Lawrence Corr (modelstorming.com).
• Competency Questions Canvas
  Grüninger & Fox (1995). Define, prioritise, and track competency questions by category: Retrieval, Constraint, Classification, Aggregation, Temporal, Provenance, Existence, Comparison.

Ontology & Semantic Model Canvas
CaseTalk original for FCO-IM. Nine blocks: Purpose & Scope, Stakeholders, Governance & Lifecycle, Competency Questions, Key Concepts, Relationships & Constraints, Reuse & Alignment, Representation & Artifacts, Success Criteria.

How — products, governance, and AI delivery

How does the model become useful — as products, contracts, governance scope, and AI workloads?

These canvases all consume the semantic core. They turn the formal model into deliverables, accountability, and operational use — and they feed back into the model when their constraints surface gaps.

Products and Deliverables

• Information Product Canvas
  Shane Gibson (AgileData, Open Source). Twelve areas: Business Questions, Actions & Outcomes, Personas, Core Business Events, Delivery Types, Data Sync, Feature Stories, Will/Won't, plus Name, Vision, Product Owner, and T-Shirt Size.
• Data Product Canvas
  Jochen Christ & Larysa Visengeriyeva (CC BY 4.0, INNOQ). Data Mesh framework: Fundamentals, Consumers & Use Cases, Source Data Alignment, Ubiquitous Language, Schema, Quality & SLAs.

Governance and contracts

• Data Governance Canvas (light)
  DAMA-DMBOK (DAMA International) by CaseTalk. Organization & Accountability, Critical Data Elements, Policies & Standards, Quality Dimensions, Compliance, KPIs, and Governance Processes.
• DMBOK Canvas (full)
  DAMA-DMBOK (DAMA International) by Howard Diesel. Organization & Accountability, Critical Data Elements, Policies & Standards, Quality Dimensions, Compliance, KPIs, and Governance Processes.
• DQ Operational Delivery Canvas
  Data Quadrants and Operational Information Delivery by Ronald Damhof and Martijn Evers. Assess 47 sync and 28 async data delivery steps across 7 phases, with delivery grades (A+ to E-), maturity levels, layer groupings, gap analysis, and coverage dashboards.
• Data Contract Canvas
  Based on Open Data Contract Standard (ODCS) by Bitol / Linux Foundation. Covers Contract Fundamentals, Schema, Semantics, Quality Rules, SLAs, Access Control, and Data Lineage.

AI and Machine Learning

• Data Readiness for AI Canvas
  CaseTalk original. Assesses AI readiness: Data Inventory, Semantic Clarity & Quality, Lineage & Governance, Gap & Remediation Plan, and Overall Readiness Score.
• AI Project Canvas
  Jan Zawadzki (2019). Ten blocks: Business Value, AI/ML Approach, Data, Integration & Deployment, Team & Governance, Success Criteria, Risks, Ethics & Compliance, Infrastructure, and Timeline.
• Machine Learning Canvas
  Louis Dorard (CC BY-SA 4.0, ownml.co). ML product planning: Value Proposition, Data Sources, ML Task, Features, Prediction Target, Model & Evaluation, Decisions & Actions, Feedback Loop, Build/Make/Buy.