# Conversational Factory

> A factory you can talk to. Read-only operational-technology platform that lets plant operators and AI clients ask industrial plants questions in natural language. Passive wire-witness across 34 OT/IT protocols, medallion data lake (Iron→Bronze→Silver), i3X v1 query plane, and a Model Context Protocol gateway exposing 10 read-only tools. Every answer is grounded in live wire data and bound to an append-only audit chain. Built on the Industrial Independence Architecture (IIA): one sovereign appliance per zone, brownfield-friendly, segmented-network-native.

This file follows the llms.txt convention (https://llmstxt.org). Every documentation page is also available as plain markdown by appending `.md` to the URL — for example, https://www.conversationalfactory.com/docs/architecture.md.

The full concatenated documentation in one document is at https://www.conversationalfactory.com/llms-full.txt.

## Read

- [Product thesis](https://www.conversationalfactory.com/docs/thesis.md): Why Conversational Factory exists. The problem, the architectural commitment, and the user outcomes that follow from it.
- [Concepts & glossary](https://www.conversationalfactory.com/docs/concepts.md): Every term in plant-floor language. Two to three sentences each. Technical docs link here on first use.
- [System architecture](https://www.conversationalfactory.com/docs/architecture.md): How the product composes. The on-box vs off-box seam, components, data flow, segmentation, and trust model.
- [Operator quickstart](https://www.conversationalfactory.com/docs/quickstart.md): Bring Conversational Factory up on a workstation in about ten minutes — and ask your plant a question.

## Build

- [Developer quickstart](https://www.conversationalfactory.com/docs/dev-quickstart.md): Bring the full chain up locally from source — witness, query plane, gateway — and ask Claude Desktop a question against real witness data.
- [Repo map](https://www.conversationalfactory.com/docs/repo-map.md): How the parent workspace is organized — services, schemas, examples, and the conventions that keep them honest.

## Standards

- [Model Context Protocol](https://modelcontextprotocol.io/): The open standard AI clients use to talk to tools. Conversational Factory exposes the gateway as an MCP server.
- [Industrial Independence Architecture (IIA)](https://github.com/riverman-io/industrial-independence-arch): The architectural foundation. Sovereign-unit-per-zone, fractal across PERA levels, security enforced by architecture rather than by policy. CC BY-SA 4.0.
- [i3X v1 specification](https://github.com/eris-ot/conversational-factory/tree/main/schemas/i3x/v1): The open standard for AI-to-OT data access — object types, relationship types, namespaces, current values, history, subscription streams.

## Optional

- [Source repository](https://github.com/eris-ot/conversational-factory): The product source tree — services, schemas, witness, conversational gateway, query plane.