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datosgobdo-mcp

A Model Context Protocol server that exposes the Dominican Republic's open government data (datos.gob.do) as tools consumable by any AI assistant.

It turns the official Dominican open-data portal into a native integration for Claude Desktop, Claude Code, Cursor, ChatGPT Desktop or any MCP-compatible client. The model can search, read, analyze, and preview the 1,053+ datasets published by the country's 266 government institutions, all from within a conversation.

What problem does it solve?

datos.gob.do publishes thousands of CSV, XLSX, and JSON files with public data: payrolls, budgets, crime statistics, health indicators, electoral data, and more. Today that information is only accessible to people who know how to navigate the CKAN portal and download files manually.

This MCP closes that gap. Anyone can ask their assistant:

• "How much does the Judicial Branch spend on salaries?"
• "Compare FONDOMARENA's approved vs. executed budget over the last three years."
• "List the 10 institutions that publish the most data."
• "What columns does the Ministry of Interior's vehicle-theft dataset have?"

…and the model — without the user having to write code, navigate URLs, or download files — runs the actual queries against the portal, downloads the data, parses it, and analyzes it.

Who is it for?

• Data journalists wanting to explore official sources without writing scrapers.
• Researchers and academics needing programmatic access to Dominican government data.
• Transparency activists and civil society monitoring budget execution, procurement, and public administration.
• Developers and data scientists prototyping dashboards or analyses on public data.
• Public officials wanting to query what their own (or other) institutions already publish.
• Anyone with civic curiosity about how the government operates.

What is MCP?

Model Context Protocol is an open standard (created by Anthropic, adopted by OpenAI and others) that lets language models connect securely to external data sources and tools. An "MCP server" exposes a collection of typed functions; the model decides when to invoke them, with what arguments, and how to combine the results.

This project is an MCP server specialized in datos.gob.do.

What is datos.gob.do?

The official open-data portal of the Dominican government, operated by OGTIC (the country's IT and communications office). It runs on CKAN 2.11.3, the same open-data software used by portals like data.gov (USA), data.gov.uk, and many other Latin American governments.

As of May 2026 it contains approximately:

• 1,053 datasets published
• 266 organizations publishing (ministries, municipalities, autonomous agencies, etc.)
• 11 thematic categories (Economy, Health, Education, Public Management…)
• 852 tags

Each dataset bundles one or more "resources" (downloadable files) in formats such as CSV, XLSX, ODS, PDF, or JSON.

This MCP is inspired by datagouv-mcp (France), but datos.gob.do runs a different platform (CKAN, not udata), so the implementation is its own.

Tools exposed

12 typed functions, grouped into four categories:

Discovery

| Tool | What it does | |---|---| | search_datasets | Search datasets by keyword, organization, tag, or group. Combinable filters, pagination. | | get_dataset | Return full metadata for a dataset: title, description, license, author, and the complete list of its resources with direct download URLs. | | list_recent_datasets | Datasets sorted by most-recent modification. Useful for monitoring portal updates. | | get_site_stats | Portal-wide counts (totals of datasets, organizations, groups, tags). |

Resources (files)

| Tool | What it does | |---|---| | get_resource | Metadata for a single resource (URL, format, size, date). | | search_resources | Search resources by name. | | download_resource_preview | Download a file and return the first N rows with their columns. Works with CSV, TSV, XLSX, XLS, and JSON. Client-side parsing because the portal has no DataStore. 5 MB cap. |

Catalog

| Tool | What it does | |---|---| | list_organizations | All publishing institutions, with a dataset count per institution. | | get_organization | Detail for a single institution (description, dataset count, URL). | | list_groups | Thematic categories with dataset counts. | | list_tags | Available tags, optionally filtered by prefix. |

Autocomplete

| Tool | What it does | |---|---| | autocomplete | Resolve partial names for datasets, organizations, groups, or tags. Useful when the user only gives a partial name — the model uses it internally to find exact slugs. |

Installation and configuration

Option A — Via uvx from PyPI (recommended)

Package: dominican-open-data-mcp (entry-point binary keeps the short name datosgobdo-mcp):

uvx --from dominican-open-data-mcp datosgobdo-mcp

uvx downloads the package, creates an isolated venv, and runs the server. First run takes a few seconds; subsequent runs are instant.

Option B — Via uvx from GitHub (latest dev version)

uvx --from git+https://github.com/alcastaro/datos.gob.do-MCP-server.git datosgobdo-mcp

Prerequisite: uv installed. On macOS:

curl -LsSf https://astral.sh/uv/install.sh | sh

Option C — Local clone (for development)

git clone https://github.com/alcastaro/datos.gob.do-MCP-server.git
cd datos.gob.do-MCP-server
uv sync
uv run datosgobdo-mcp   # starts the server on stdio (Ctrl+C to exit)

macOS note: avoid cloning inside ~/Library/CloudStorage/GoogleDrive-* or similar paths. macOS blocks executing binaries from cloud-synced paths (TCC restriction). Use ~/code/ or equivalent.

Claude Desktop configuration

Edit ~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json (macOS) or %APPDATA%\Claude\claude_desktop_config.json (Windows):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "datosgobdo": {
      "command": "/Users/YOUR_USERNAME/.local/bin/uvx",
      "args": [
        "--from",
        "git+https://github.com/alcastaro/datos.gob.do-MCP-server.git",
        "datosgobdo-mcp"
      ]
    }
  }
}

Restart Claude Desktop completely (Cmd+Q, not just closing the window). Settings → Developer → Local MCP servers should show datosgobdo in running state.

Claude Code configuration

claude mcp add datosgobdo -- uvx --from git+https://github.com/alcastaro/datos.gob.do-MCP-server.git datosgobdo-mcp

Cursor / other clients

Same principle: register uvx as the command with --from git+... datosgobdo-mcp as args. Consult each client's docs for the location of its configuration file.

Usage examples

Once configured, you can ask the model:

Basic exploration

Use the datosgobdo MCP and tell me how many datasets are on the datos.gob.do portal.

→ Invokes get_site_stats. Reply: 1,053 datasets, 266 organizations.

Search with analysis

Find the 5 most relevant datasets about budget on datos.gob.do and summarize which institution publishes each one.

→ Invokes search_datasets(query="presupuesto", limit=5) and the model writes the summary.

Name resolution + detail

Find the slug for the Ministry of Finance and tell me how many datasets it has published.

→ autocomplete(kind="organization", query="hacienda") → get_organization(id="ministerio-de-hacienda").

Real data analysis

Show me the first 20 rows of the Judicial Branch budget CSV and tell me the three largest line items.

→ search_datasets(query="poder judicial") → get_dataset("presupuesto-poder-judicial") → download_resource_preview(url=..., format="csv", rows=20) → the model identifies the largest items.

Monitoring

List the 10 most recently updated datasets on the portal.

→ list_recent_datasets(limit=10).

Architecture

src/datosgobdo_mcp/
  server.py        FastMCP server + tool definitions (Pydantic typed)
  ckan.py          CKAN client: requests, Solr escaping, formatters
  preview.py       Capped file download + parsers for CSV/XLSX/JSON

Design decisions

• FastMCP instead of the low-level SDK: tools are functions decorated with @mcp.tool() and typed via Pydantic. Less boilerplate, automatic argument validation.
• Reused httpx.AsyncClient: a single persistent connection, no TCP-handshake overhead per request.
• Solr escaping: CKAN fq filters use Solr/Lucene syntax. User-supplied values go through _escape_solr(), which escapes the 13 reserved characters (+ - & | ! ( ) { } [ ] ^ " ~ * ? : \ /). Without this, a tag containing a quote would break the query.
• Defensive truncation: long descriptions (some institutions publish 5+ KB of text per organization) are truncated to 300 chars in list responses. Without this, a single call could burn thousands of tokens of model context.
• list_recent_datasets reoriented: CKAN's API exposes recently_changed_packages_activity_list, but it returns "activities" with raw, un-hydrated metadata — the model would receive {object_id: "uuid", activity_type: "changed package"} with no way to know which dataset it refers to. We use package_search?sort=metadata_modified+desc to return already-formatted datasets in a single call.
• DataStore not available: the datos.gob.do portal does not have the DataStore extension installed, so there is no datastore_search endpoint or SQL queries against resource contents. The workaround is download_resource_preview: we download the file (5 MB cap) and parse it client-side with csv (stdlib) or openpyxl. Enough for the model to understand the structure.
• Encoding fallback: many published files are in CP1252 or Latin-1 (not UTF-8). The parser tries UTF-8 → UTF-8-sig → Latin-1 → CP1252 → UTF-8 with errors=replace.
• stderr logging: per the MCP debugging guide, stdio servers must never write to stdout (it breaks the protocol). All logs go to stderr and are captured by the client in ~/Library/Logs/Claude/mcp-server-datosgobdo.log (macOS).

Technical stack

• mcp — Anthropic's official Python SDK (FastMCP)
• httpx — async HTTP client
• openpyxl — read-only streaming XLSX reader
• csv, json — stdlib for other formats

Known limitations

• No SQL queries against resource contents: the portal has no DataStore. Workaround: download_resource_preview + analysis by the model.
• Preview limited to 5 MB: larger files are truncated. Enough to understand structure, not for full statistical analysis.
• No ODS or PDF support in preview: only CSV, TSV, XLSX, XLS, and JSON. ODS and PDF files are exposed via their direct download URL.
• Read-only: the MCP does not write to the portal (no authentication, no package_create, resource_create endpoints, etc.). By design.
• Exotic encodings: a fallback exists (UTF-8 → CP1252), but files with unusual encoding may show broken characters.

Development

Local setup

git clone https://github.com/alcastaro/datos.gob.do-MCP-server.git
cd datos.gob.do-MCP-server
uv sync

Test with the MCP Inspector

MCP Inspector is the official tool for testing MCP servers in isolation:

npx @modelcontextprotocol/inspector uv run datosgobdo-mcp

Opens http://localhost:6274 with a form builder to invoke tools manually and see raw request/response JSON.

Logs

In Claude Desktop (macOS): tail -f ~/Library/Logs/Claude/mcp-server-datosgobdo.log

The server logs to stderr:

• Startup (endpoint, number of registered tools)
• Fatal errors with full traceback
• Shutdown

Iteration

When you edit code:

1. Commit + push to main on GitHub.
2. Clear the uvx cache to force a refresh: uv cache clean datosgobdo-mcp.
3. Restart the MCP client.

For faster iteration, configure the client to point to your local clone instead of the GitHub repo: command: /path/to/clone/.venv/bin/datosgobdo-mcp.

Manual tests against the live API

uv run python -c "
import asyncio
from datosgobdo_mcp import ckan
print(asyncio.run(ckan.get_site_stats()))
asyncio.run(ckan.close_client())
"

Contributing

Pull requests welcome. Obvious areas for improvement:

• Automated tests with pytest-httpx (mocking CKAN).
• summarize_csv tool with aggregate statistics (count, min, max, distinct values per column).
• Preview support for ODS and Parquet.
• Local cache of frequent responses (organizations, groups, tags change rarely).
• find_dataset_about tool that combines autocomplete + search_datasets with semantic ranking.

Credits

Developed by Alberto Castillo Aroca (@alcastaro) with contributions from Juana Casique (@juanacasique).

Data published by the institutions of the Dominican State via datos.gob.do, a portal operated by OGTIC.

Inspired by datagouv-mcp (Etalab, Government of France).

License

MIT. See LICENSE if present, otherwise assume standard MIT terms.

Data accessed through this MCP is subject to the license under which each Dominican institution publishes it on datos.gob.do (typically Open Data Commons Open Database License — ODbL).