# Conversational Factory

> A factory you can talk to. Three layers: (1) Industrial Independence Architecture (IIA) is the security CONCEPT — sovereign-per-zone, one-way, security by architecture; an open spec, claim-by-name, anyone may implement. (2) The ROLE SPEC is the shape every conversational factory takes: ingest data plane (passive: observe-only, e.g. a witness; or active: read-only poll/query, e.g. discovery) → inside historian → one-way seam (optionally a hardware data diode) → outside copy → query plane. (3) Conversational Factory is the open, LOCAL PRODUCT that fills the shape — one coherent, source-available, deployable bundle you run on-site, every line of the seam auditable; the concept is canonical, the product is reference, every role swappable. The query-plane slot is a socket: CF's local query plane, the hosted modelpond SaaS pointed at your deployment, or your own. Nothing flows back. Status: coming soon, source-available; early access via river@riverman.io.

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 egress problem, the one-way 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 inside/outside one-way seam, components, data flow, segmentation, and trust model.
- [Role definitions](https://www.conversationalfactory.com/docs/role-definitions.md): The canonical roles — ingest data plane (passive/active), inside historian, outside copy, query plane — the one-way seam between them, and how they distribute across single-box and two-box-plus-diode deployments.
- [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 — data source, query plane, gateway — and ask Claude Desktop a question.
- [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 — the one-way sync, the outside historian, the MCP gateway, and schemas.