Conversational Factory turns natural-language questions into queries against live operational data — protocols decoded on the wire, assets named on the fly, every answer bound to an append-only audit chain. Read-only by architecture, not by policy.
Assets are poorly documented or undocumented. Naming is tribal. The drive that's been running line 3 for fifteen years has never had its tag table audited.
Protocols and addressing models vary by vendor. Modbus speaks register addresses; OPC UA speaks node IDs; Sparkplug speaks topics; nobody speaks asset.
Plant-floor data is split across isolated systems. Historian, SCADA, MES, asset management — five systems, five truths, one operator who needs the answer now.
Existing paths to data run through enterprise systems instead of the equipment boundary. The shortest line between a question and an answer goes through a sysadmin in another building.
Conversational Factory is an implementation of the Industrial Independence Architecture — sovereign-unit-per-zone, fractal across PERA levels, security enforced by architecture rather than by policy.
Continuous packet capture on every monitored interface. Deep packet inspection for Modbus, EtherNet/IP, OPC UA, DNP3, IEC 104, S7comm, PROFINET — and 27 more. Frame-level integrity checks. No agents on PLCs. No polling.
Iron pcapng → Bronze typed events → Silver conversations & asset edges → Gold rollups. The historian is not a separate database — it's a view over the witness's lake. Capture first, name later.
Materialized current-truth view of every device the witness has ever seen. Vendor, role, Purdue level, IP, MAC, current state, risk score. Multi-tenant org → site → zone → subzone hierarchy with RTDP replication across the mesh.
The thin Rust service that re-exposes the witness as i3X v1 — a small, opinionated set of endpoints any industrial system can implement. Object types, relationships, current values, history, subscription streams. Open standard.
query.history, subscribe.streamThe front door for AI clients. Exposes 10 read-only verbs as MCP tools. Translates natural-language questions into i3X calls, composes grounded answers with citations, and writes every interaction to the audit ledger.
The witness's web UI at 127.0.0.1:5001. Where humans go to upload PCAPs, view the asset map, see findings, manage scans, configure the witness. Flask + Jinja, no SPA. Three.js workspace viewer for topology.
Six hops from the wire to a grounded answer. Six places to break read-only — and none of them have a write path.
Fig 03.1 · Iron → Bronze → Silver → i3X → MCP. Inverse arrows do not exist. The platform has no write path to any plant device — not because policy forbids it, but because no such tool is exposed and no such interface is implemented.
Meet brownfield networks where they are. No device changes. No protocol changes. No topology changes. Forty-year-old PLCs alongside brand-new VFDs on protocols that predate TCP/IP — the witness observes; it does not prescribe.
No device writes anywhere in the platform. The conversational layer cannot order a setpoint change. Even if an attacker controlled the LLM, the worst they could do is read.
The lake records every observable conversation. Operators name what they care about retroactively. They do not have to know which tags matter on day one — schema-on-read against the lake gives them history back to capture-start.
Every zone appliance is complete for its scope. Disconnected from the mesh, it still captures, still historizes, still answers operator questions. The product is sovereign at every fractal level — cell, line, area, site.
DNS, DHCP, TLS, OPC UA, MQTT, Sparkplug B where they fit. i3X for the AI surface — open, specified, implementable. PERA+, ISA-95, IEC 62443 for the architectural alignment.
Local function is the default. Cloud is a viewport. The system never assumes upstream connectivity exists — and continues to be useful when it doesn't.
Zone segmentation. Signed configuration artifacts. mTLS at every internal hop. Default-deny conduits between INBOUND / DMZ / OUTBOUND. No HTTP at the boundary in either direction. No live mutation API.
Every communication is governed by an explicit data contract. The IDS doubles as a contract-attestation observer — the system can show you not just "the firewall blocked X" but "the firewall behaviour matches the contract."
A workstation. Docker. A browser. Optionally Claude Desktop. The witness ships with realistic ICS/OT capture fixtures so you can see the asset map populate before you point it at a real network.
Full operator quickstart →$ git clone https://github.com/riverman-io/conversational-factory $ cd conversational-factory $ make first-run ok appended secrets to services/witness/.env ok db reachable ok migrations applied ok app healthy ok provisioned new i3X API key $ make up eriswitness-dev-app Up (healthy) :5001 cf-query-plane Up :8090 cf-gateway Up :8091 $ open http://127.0.0.1:5001▍