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For AI Agents

This site is published for people and for AI agents. The docs/ tree behind it is an Open Knowledge Format (OKF) v0.2 knowledge bundle, and two further bundles (the fractal concept ontology and the appendix proofs) are published through it. If you are an agent, or you are wiring one up, consume the content through the endpoints below rather than scraping rendered HTML.

Entry points

Endpoint What you get
/fractal-notebooks/llms.txt Linked outline of every page, concept, proof and interactive app with a one-line description each, per the llms.txt convention. Start here.
/fractal-notebooks/llms-full.txt The whole corpus in one file: every page's Markdown source with its frontmatter, each prefixed by its canonical URL: and Source: lines. Prefer this over crawling.
Markdown twin of any page Replace the trailing / of a page URL with .md. For directory pages (the home page, the section landings, the OKF group indexes) append index.md instead. Examples: /foundations/history/ has the twin /foundations/history.md; /metabolic-scaling/ has /metabolic-scaling/index.md; the home page has /index.md. When in doubt, read the <link rel="alternate" type="text/markdown"> element in the page head, which carries the exact URL.
OKF bundle roots /okf/concepts/index.md (32 concepts in 12 groups) and /okf/proofs/index.md (12 proofs). Both are served verbatim here; the canonical exchange copies live in the repository under okf/. The human-readable overview is Knowledge Bundles.
Change logs /log/ for the site, plus /okf/concepts/log/ and /okf/proofs/log/ for the two bundles. Newest entries first; bullets are tagged Creation, Update or Deprecation.
/fractal-notebooks/sitemap.xml Standard crawl surface. This is a GitHub Pages project site, so crawlers read the host-root robots.txt, which is fully permissive; the copy at /fractal-notebooks/robots.txt is informational and restates these entry points.
Notebook pages The 18 published notebooks are pre-rendered from their stored outputs; nothing executes at build time. Each page's frontmatter carries notebook.source (GitHub blob), notebook.raw, notebook.nbviewer and notebook.colab. The .ipynb files themselves are not hosted on this site, so fetch them from GitHub. The 73 unpublished research notebooks are catalogued on Research Notebooks.
React apps (/react/) One crawlable URL. The apps are a HashRouter single-page application with 16 routes after #/, rendered entirely by JavaScript, so fetching /react/ returns an empty shell. Read React Apps for the route table and what each app does.
Streamlit apps Not hosted anywhere. Their sources live in the repository's apps/ directory and are documented on Streamlit Apps.
Fractal RAG MCP server Self-hosted and not public. The Fractal RAG guide explains how to run the Weaviate index and the eight-tool MCP server yourself; it indexes the same pages and the same concept ontology that you can read here directly.
Source repository The bundles, the notebooks, the validator (scripts/validate_okf.py) and the build pipeline.

HTML head signals

Every rendered page declares its Markdown twin and structured metadata in its <head>. This page, for example, carries:

<link rel="alternate" type="text/markdown" href="https://tyson-swetnam.github.io/fractal-notebooks/agents.md">
<meta name="okf:type" content="Guide">
<meta name="okf:status" content="stable">
<meta name="okf:generated-at" content="2026-10-24T00:00:00Z">
<script type="application/ld+json">
{ "@context": "https://schema.org", "@type": "LearningResource",
  "learningResourceType": "Guide",
  "url": "https://tyson-swetnam.github.io/fractal-notebooks/agents/",
  "encoding": { "@type": "MediaObject",
                "contentUrl": "https://tyson-swetnam.github.io/fractal-notebooks/agents.md",
                "encodingFormat": "text/markdown" },
  "license": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/", ... }
</script>

The JSON-LD @type follows the page type: ScholarlyArticle (with author on Part II, the only Part whose pages name their authors) for Paper Section pages, LearningResource for Chapter, Notebook and Guide pages, CreativeWork otherwise.

Reading the OKF frontmatter

Each page's YAML frontmatter answers the questions an agent should ask before relying on content:

  • What is this? type. On the documentation bundle: Index (home and section landings), Chapter (Part I), Paper Section (Parts II to V), Notebook (rendered notebooks), Guide (apps, Fractal RAG, this page), Reference (glossary, reference lists, the research-notebook catalogue) and Log. In the knowledge bundles: Fractal Concept and Fractal Proof. Plus title, description and controlled tags.
  • Where did it come from? generated: { by, at } uses the OKF actor syntax: human:tswetnam for authored pages, process:scripts/render_notebooks.py for notebook pages, process:fractal-rag-okf-export for concepts, and <producer>/<model> (for example claude-code/claude-fable-5-1) for pages drafted by an AI assistant, which carry no verified entry until a human re-reads them. sources lists the external references a page's claims depend on (for a notebook page, the .ipynb it was rendered from). Part II pages also carry paper, authors (with ORCID iDs) and citation; Parts III to V carry paper only, because their pages name no authors.
  • How much should I trust it?
    • verified, a list of { by, at } events, marks pages a human has re-read; its presence puts a page in OKF's human-reviewed tier. A page without it is generated or not yet re-read, which is a weaker claim, not an error.
    • Notebook pages: notebook.cells gives markdown, code, executed, figures and errors counts. errors above zero means a stored cell raised; the page shows it as a failure admonition with the exception name and message. A notebook rendered from stale or missing outputs is marked status: draft.
    • Proofs: verification_status is verified, partially-verified or unverified, and every proof step is tagged [verified] (reproduced with SymPy or NumPy) or [asserted] (rests on a cited, named theorem that is not re-derived). Treat [asserted] steps as citations to check, not as results of this site.
  • Is it current? status is stable or draft. stale_after, where present, dates a page whose content should be re-verified after that date.

Research content is unpublished draft material

Parts II to V (Metabolic Scaling, Spectral Geometry, Biological Geometry, Research Hypotheses) are manuscript drafts and a preregistration framework, not peer-reviewed publications. Their section pages carry status: draft (the four landing pages are stable), and some of their citations are still placeholders. Quote them as working drafts attributed to this site, and do not present their claims as established results.

Bundle shapes differ on purpose. The two exchange bundles stay spec-pure: okf/concepts/index.md and okf/proofs/index.md carry only okf_version: "0.2", and the group indexes and the two bundle logs have no frontmatter at all. The documentation bundle is richer: its home page declares okf_version: "0.2" and its landings and log.md carry full frontmatter, the convention shared with the related sites below.

Citing this material

  • Cite the canonical page URL, the resource field, not the .md twin.
  • For the project as a whole, the home page gives a BibTeX entry, swetnam2026fractals: Swetnam, Pelletier and Enquist, Fractal Patterns in Nature: Self-Affinity vs Self-Similarity, 2026, https://github.com/tyson-swetnam/fractal-notebooks.
  • Proof pages name their historical_source. Cite the original theorem for the mathematics, and this site for the verification record.

The author publishes other GitHub Pages sites with the same conventions:

Ground rules for agents

All content is CC BY 4.0: reuse freely with attribution. Crawling, indexing and AI grounding are welcome (see the host robots.txt). Prefer llms-full.txt for one-shot ingestion over crawling the site, respect status: draft, and cite the canonical page URL (the resource field), not the .md source URL, when referencing this material for humans. Third-party material keeps its own licence: the OpenTopography 3DEP tutorial notebooks mirrored in the repository are GPL-3.0 upstream.