No relation of all this to fractals is known, but in my work I've found that they do have a common property, that is, a non-integer dimension (at some scale).

For example, if you request a scale of 2.0, your object will be 200 percent larger than the original (in each dimension).

And the data doesn't need to be "big" to be valuable, though scale is certainly a helpful dimension when working to create defensible data barriers.