Vancouver City Open Data MCP

An MCP server that exposes the City of Vancouver Open Data Portal (Opendatasoft Explore API v2.1) as tools an LLM can call directly: search datasets, inspect their schema, query/filter records, discover facet values, and export bounded slices of data.

Features

• search_datasets — full-text and ODSQL search across the ~200 datasets in the catalog.

• get_dataset — metadata and field schema for a single dataset.

• query_records — filter/sort/paginate a dataset's records with ODSQL (where, select, order_by, group_by, q, refine).

• get_facets — discover valid filter values (and counts) before writing a where/refine clause.

• export_dataset — bulk export in csv/json/geojson/parquet, capped at a configurable row limit.

• Runs over stdio (for Claude Desktop/Claude Code) or Streamable HTTP (for remote deployment) from the same codebase.

• No API key required for public read access; an optional key raises Opendatasoft's rate limits.

Related MCP server: MCP Data Vermont

Install

npm install
npm run build

Usage — stdio (Claude Desktop / Claude Code)

stdio is the default transport — running the built binary with no flags starts it directly.

Claude Desktop config (claude_desktop_config.json):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "vancouver-opendata": {
      "command": "node",
      "args": ["/absolute/path/to/vancouver-city-opendata-mcp/dist/index.js"]
    }
  }
}

Or explore it interactively with the MCP Inspector:

npx @modelcontextprotocol/inspector node dist/index.js

Usage — HTTP

MCP_TRANSPORT=http PORT=3000 node dist/index.js
# or: node dist/index.js --http

This exposes a single /mcp endpoint implementing the Streamable HTTP transport (session lifecycle via the mcp-session-id header — POST to initialize/call tools, GET for the SSE stream, DELETE to close a session).

curl -s -X POST http://127.0.0.1:3000/mcp \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' -H 'Accept: application/json, text/event-stream' \
  -d '{"jsonrpc":"2.0","id":1,"method":"initialize","params":{"protocolVersion":"2024-11-05","capabilities":{},"clientInfo":{"name":"curl","version":"0"}}}'

Note: there is no inbound authentication in v1. If deploying the HTTP transport somewhere reachable beyond localhost, put it behind your own auth/reverse proxy, and set ALLOWED_HOSTS for DNS-rebinding protection.

Environment variables

Rate limits

Opendatasoft enforces a public per-IP quota (observed at 15,000 requests/day, plus per-dataset limits) surfaced via X-RateLimit-* response headers. export_dataset and friends will return a clear isError message if you're throttled. Set ODS_API_KEY to raise your limits.

Development

npm run test          # unit tests (no network access required)
RUN_LIVE_TESTS=1 npm test   # also runs the opt-in suite against the real API
npm run dev            # tsc --watch

License

MIT