GovData MCP

A Model Context Protocol (MCP) server that lets AI agents search, explore, and fetch open datasets from official government data portals. One unified tool interface across the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia — with per-portal quirks (API migrations, auth walls, bilingual metadata, stale DataStore flags) absorbed behind a common adapter layer.

Built for the typical agent workflow: “Is there a government dataset for X?” → find candidates → inspect the files → preview rows or grab a download link and move on.

Key Features

• Four national portals, one interface. US (data.gov v4 / DCAT), UK (data.gov.uk / CKAN), Canada (open.canada.ca / CKAN), Australia (data.gov.au / CKAN + DataStore).
• Token-frugal by design. Descriptions are HTML-stripped and truncated, search results are compact summaries, and large files are never inlined by accident.
• Row-level preview. Uses CKAN DataStore where available (Australia), and transparently falls back to reading the head of CSV/TSV files everywhere else.
• Agent-friendly failure modes. Errors are returned as actionable text (“use get_download_link instead”, “retry with dataset_id”, “available portals: …”) — never raw tracebacks.
• Extensible registry. Adding another CKAN-based portal is a single config entry; non-CKAN portals plug in via a small adapter class.
• Dual transport. stdio for local clients (Claude Desktop etc.), stateless streamable-http for serverless deployment (Google Cloud Run).

Supported Portals

Requirements

• Python 3.11+
• An api.data.gov API key for the US portal (free; other portals need no credentials)

Installation

git clone https://github.com/YOUR_ORG/Gov-Stat-MCP-Server.git
cd Gov-Stat-MCP-Server

# pip
pip install -e ".[dev]"

# or conda
conda env create -f environment.yml
conda activate opendata-mcp

Copy .env.example to .env and set your key:

DATAGOV_API_KEY=your-api-data-gov-key

Getting Started

Standard config for most MCP clients (stdio transport):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "govdata": {
      "command": "govdata-mcp",
      "env": {
        "DATAGOV_API_KEY": "your-api-data-gov-key"
      }
    }
  }
}