NYC Open Data — Capital Projects MCP Server

A local MCP server over the NYC Capital Projects Dashboard (CPD) datasets on NYC Open Data. It ingests four public Socrata datasets into a single local DuckDB and exposes 16 tools so an AI assistant can answer schedule, budget, and lifecycle questions about NYC capital projects — with the domain rules (PID↔FMS many-to-many, role-aware agency attribution, signed variance reporting) baked into the tools instead of left for the caller to rediscover.

Source datasets (Socrata)

Related MCP server: Personal Task Manager MCP

What's an MCP — and why use one?

MCP (Model Context Protocol) is a standard way to give an AI assistant a new, trusted skill. Instead of pasting a spreadsheet into a chat and hoping the model reads it right, you hand it a set of well-defined tools it can call — with the domain rules already baked in. It's the difference between telling an analyst "here's a spreadsheet, good luck" and hiring one who already knows the data cold.

Why not just ChatGPT + a CSV? Public data is messy in ways a generic chatbot can't see. Ask a raw LLM "what's NYC's biggest library project?" and it'll happily double-count a budget line shared by several projects, call a long-finished branch "still under construction" because its funding line is still open, or — seeing only three reporting periods a year (Jan / May / Sep) — assume months of data have gone missing. It sounds confident — and it's wrong. This server encodes the guardrails once — the PID↔FMS many-to-many, role-aware agency attribution, the 3×-a-year reporting cadence, signed reporting — so every answer is consistent, sourced, and reproducible.

What one prompt can build

This isn't only a query tool. Point an AI agent at it and a single prompt produces a polished, self-contained interactive HTML report — with the domain rules already applied. Three real examples (one prompt → one file; click to open the live report):

1 · Schedule ↔ Budget topology — the many-to-many anatomy of the portfolio

Analyze the schedule and budget many-to-many relationship across NYC capital projects and build a single interactive HTML report — the 1:1-vs-fan-out split, the outlier extremes, a per-agency breakdown, and budget concentration.

▶ Open the report — fan-out rings, a bipartite diagram, the "tangled few" outliers (hover to see the real schedules and budget lines), an agency scatter, and a budget concentration curve.

2 · Parks projects over $50M — every big build, and what funds it

Build an interactive one-file HTML report on NYC Parks projects over $50M. For each budget line, show every schedule associated with it, with phase and forecast completion.

▶ Open the report — 23 budget lines; hover any to reveal its linked schedules. Quietly applies the category taxonomy, so the $1.9B "Park Pedestrian Bridges" route to Bridges, not Parks.

3 · Budget & schedule change monitor — what moved this period, by agency

Build an interactive one-file HTML monitor of NYC capital projects' budget and schedule changes by managing agency, with a click-through detail view for each project's schedule and budget history.

▶ Open the report — KPIs, a trend chart, a sortable watchlist, and a per-project popup with schedule-variance bars and a stacked budget-vs-spend chart.

Each report was generated from the prompt shown, then lightly polished. The figures are a snapshot of reporting period 202601 — browse all three in the report gallery.

🚀 Quick Start

Want the data without the setup? If your AI can run commands on your computer, just ask it to install everything for you.

✅ Let your AI install it (easiest)

Works with AI agents that can run terminal commands — Claude Code, Claude cowork (Claude Desktop's local-agent mode), Codex CLI, or another coding agent like Cursor.

1. Start your AI agent on this computer.

2. Paste the message below.

3. Approve each step (Allow, or press y) as it clones, installs, and connects the server.

Message to paste:

Install the MCP server at
https://github.com/WillHsiaoNYC/NYC-Opendata-Capital-Projects-MCP on this
machine — follow its README to clone the repo, install it with uv, run
`od-cpd init` to download the four NYC Open Data datasets into a local
database, and wire it into my MCP client config. Then run a verification
query to confirm it works.

What "done" looks like: your AI reports the loaded reporting period (e.g. 202601), confirms od-cpd is connected with its 16 tools, and answers a test question like "What's the biggest NYC capital project right now?" Takes a few minutes, mostly the dataset download.

🖥️ Claude Desktop (chat)

Claude Desktop can use a local server but can't install one itself. Run the Manual install, then add od-cpd to its own config (with the absolute path to uv) and fully restart — see Connect an MCP client.

☁️ claude.ai or ChatGPT (web)

These connect only to remote MCP servers, not a local one like this — so they can't run od-cpd directly. Use one of the options above.

Manual install

Requires Python ≥ 3.12 and uv.

git clone https://github.com/WillHsiaoNYC/NYC-Opendata-Capital-Projects-MCP.git
cd NYC-Opendata-Capital-Projects-MCP

uv sync
uv run od-cpd init        # download + materialize all 4 datasets → ./var/cpd.duckdb
uv run od-cpd status      # confirm the loaded reporting period

Optional: set OD_CPD_SOCRATA_APP_TOKEN to a free Socrata app token to avoid anonymous rate limits during ingest.

Connect an MCP client

The server speaks stdio. Use the absolute path to uv (run which uv to find it) — GUI apps like Claude Desktop don't inherit your shell PATH, so a bare uv command fails silently.

Claude Code — from inside the repo folder:

claude mcp add od-cpd --env PYTHONPATH="$(pwd)/src" -- \
  "$(which uv)" run --directory "$(pwd)" od-cpd-server

Claude Desktop — edit its config (macOS: ~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json), add the block below, then fully quit (⌘Q) and reopen Claude Desktop:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "od-cpd": {
      "command": "/absolute/path/to/uv",
      "args": ["run", "--directory", "/absolute/path/to/repo", "od-cpd-server"],
      "env": { "PYTHONPATH": "/absolute/path/to/repo/src" }
    }
  }
}

(PYTHONPATH keeps the launch robust when uv's editable install is flaky — e.g. on iCloud-synced paths.)

Keeping data fresh

The source datasets report on a Jan / May / Sep cycle, and Socrata typically publishes each period ~2.5–3 months later (so new data usually lands around April, August, and December). od-cpd update is a no-op when nothing is newer, so it's safe to run any time — check around those months:

uv run od-cpd status      # what period is loaded now
uv run od-cpd update      # re-ingest only if Socrata is newer

To keep it fresh automatically, schedule update (e.g. monthly via cron):

# 9am on the 1st of each month
0 9 1 * * cd /path/to/repo && uv run od-cpd update

What's inside

• docs/FEATURES.md — the canonical inventory: all 16 tools and every domain rule the server encodes. Start here.

The headline domain rules, briefly:

• "Project" is ambiguous. A PID identifies a schedule; an FMS ID identifies a budget line. They are many-to-many (~3% fan out), so the tools list all counterparts rather than silently picking one.

• Agency attribution is role-aware. "Agency X's projects" means the sponsor (owner) view for normal agencies, but the managing (builder) view for the three construction-manager agencies (DDC/DCAS/EDC).

• Values are reported signed and neutral ("moved 45 days later", "budget grew $2.1M") rather than only surfacing one direction.

Layout

• src/od_cpd/ — ingest, materialization, and the MCP server + tools

• data/ — curated agency/category dictionaries (YAML, tracked)

• tests/ — unit tests + golden evals (uv run pytest)

• var/, exports/ — runtime DuckDB + exports (gitignored, regenerable)

Develop

uv run pytest             # fallback: PYTHONPATH=src python -m pytest

Classification is dictionary-driven: edit data/agencies.yaml / data/categories.yaml (not Python) to adjust agency or category mappings, then re-materialize. See CLAUDE.md for the atomic-swap pattern that applies materialization changes without re-downloading.

Data caveats

This is an independent project, not affiliated with the City of New York. Figures reflect whatever reporting period the underlying Socrata datasets carry at ingest time; always check dataset_info for the current period and per-dataset caveats.