FCSC MCP Server

An MCP server that exposes official UAE statistics from the Federal Competitiveness and Statistics Centre (FCSC) as tools an AI assistant can call.

It acts as the bridge between Claude and the FCSC SDMX API: Claude never calls FCSC directly. It invokes a tool here, this server calls the FCSC endpoint, and the response is returned as readable, labelled data. FCSC credentials stay in this server's environment and are never exposed to the model.

Status

The tool layer is complete and tested against local stubs. It has not yet returned live FCSC data — see Known blocker below.

Related MCP server: global-education-mcp

Tools

Rather than defining 50 near-identical tools, the server is driven by datasets.json — a manifest of 50 FCSC dataflows spanning Economy, Social and Environment topics. Claude discovers what exists with listDatasets, then reads it with getDatasetData.

Setup

Requires Node 20 or newer. The SDK's HTTP transport depends on @hono/node-server, which does not support Node 18.

npm install

Local use — stdio transport

The client launches the server as a subprocess and speaks JSON-RPC over stdin/stdout. Nothing listens on a port.

npm start

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "fcsc-statistics": {
      "command": "node",
      "args": ["/absolute/path/to/my-mcp-server/server.js"]
    }
  }
}

Hosted use — Streamable HTTP transport

One process serving many clients over the network. This is what claude.ai custom connectors and shared team deployments require.

npm run start:http          # listens on :3000, endpoint POST /mcp
curl localhost:3000/health  # {"status":"ok","datasets":50,...}

PORT, HOST and CORS_ORIGIN are configurable via the environment.

Note that nohup npm start & will not work for backgrounding — the stdio server exits immediately when its stdin is closed. Background start:http instead, or run either under a process manager such as systemd or pm2.

To register as a claude.ai custom connector the endpoint must be reachable at a public HTTPS URL — a private EC2 address won't do. Terminate TLS with nginx, Caddy or an ALB in front of the service, and give Claude the https://your-domain/mcp URL.

Environment variables

Regenerating the dataset manifest

datasets.json is generated from the FCSC deep-links spreadsheet:

npm run build:manifest -- "/path/to/FCSC- MOBILE APP- Deep links.xlsx"

The generator scans the three URL columns for the first /rest/data/ URL and normalises it to the flat (dimensionAtObservation=AllDimensions) flavour itself, rather than trusting the spreadsheet's "SDMX flavour (Flat)" column — that column has known defects, including one row shifted a column right and 19 rows whose time-series URL duplicates the flat one.

Two rows (Vital Statistics → Birth, Death) carry no URL at all and are reported as skipped.

Known blocker

The FCSC hosts sit behind Cloudflare bot protection, which returns HTTP 403 to every non-browser client — the whole domain, not just the API paths. A browser User-Agent does not help.

The API itself is live and serving: an external request reached DF_LFUNEMP_ED and received HTTP 200 with SDMX-ML. So the barrier is Cloudflare sitting between a program and the API, not the API itself.

Needed from FCSC: a machine-usable path to the API — an API key, a service account, or allowlisting for the server — plus confirmation of which response format the service will serve.

The server negotiates for SDMX-JSON, falls back to SDMX-CSV, and detects SDMX-ML and reports it rather than failing silently. If FCSC only ever serve SDMX-ML, an XML parsing path needs adding.

Layout

server.js                  stdio entry point
http-server.js             Streamable HTTP entry point (hosted / claude.ai)
create-server.js           MCP server factory and tool definitions
fcsc.js                    URL building, HTTP, SDMX parsing, table rendering
datasets.json              Generated manifest of 50 FCSC dataflows
scripts/build-manifest.py  Regenerates datasets.json from the spreadsheet