Search the public-source catalogue
catalog_searchSearch a sealed snapshot of public data sources for feeds that might answer a question — the first move when you need a source and do not already know one. Example: {"question": "county unemployment rate monthly", "limit": 10, "format": "csv"}. READ THIS BEFORE YOU TRUST A RESULT. The snapshot indexes ONE provider, Data.gov, and only part of it: about 22,000 records were catalogued out of the ~550,000 Data.gov lists, and only about a thousand of those record which data formats they publish. So a miss is NOT evidence that no such source exists — go and look yourself — and a hit is a lead to open and read, never a source anyone has verified. Returns {status, question, requirement, generation, candidates, work}. generation says which sealed snapshot answered and when it was published; cite its store digest. work reports what the search did — ranges_scanned, ranges_pruned, candidates_examined, member_bytes_read — and no wall-clock time. Every ranked candidate comes back whatever its disposition — admitted, human_escalation_required or refused — because refused overwhelmingly means the entry does not record its data formats, not that the source is unusable. format takes ONE lowercase token and withholds nothing: it states the format your question requires. Every ranked entry still comes back, and one that does not declare it arrives with filters_match: false and disposition: refused. Naming a format changes the judgement beside each entry, not which entries you see. There is no way to ask for two — the catalogue admits one format filter per question — so send format once or leave it out. title, publisher, description and rights may each be null, and spatial_scope is a LIST of bounding-box strings or null: the catalogue does not record these for every entry. provider_record_url is the entry's own identifier, and only when that identifier is itself an https URL — about one entry in four is identified by an opaque id and has no page to open, so a null means search the provider's own site rather than building an address out of provider_record_id. There are no relevance scores anywhere: the order is the ranking, and the facts are the evidence. This tool checks question, limit and format against the shapes above BEFORE it calls anything, so a malformed argument is refused here and never reaches the catalogue; were one to get through, a bad limit or a missing question can surface as the service's own 422 rather than as catalog_search_invalid. Needs a workspace credential, and the same search is mr-data catalog search on the command line.
Input Schema
| Name | Required | Description | Default |
|---|---|---|---|
| limit | No | ||
| format | No | ||
| question | Yes |