Data Europa

What Data Europa MCP server does

The Data Europa MCP server gives MCP-compatible agents access to data.europa.eu, the European Union’s open-data hub. The portal aggregates roughly 1.6 million datasets from EU institutions and the 27 member states. The server focuses on dataset discovery and metadata lookup rather than presenting a separate data store.

Its main search operation accepts a text query and optional filters, result count, starting offset, and sort order. A package lookup retrieves one dataset record by its identifier. Additional operations expose publishing organizations, dataset themes or groups, and tags that can be searched or listed. This makes the server useful when an agent needs to find relevant public datasets before deciding which source to inspect further.

How it works

The Data Europa MCP server uses the portal endpoint at https://data.europa.eu/api/hub/search/ and does not require an API key. You can connect through the hosted Pipeworx MCP endpoint at https://gateway.pipeworx.io/data-europa/mcp, or use the full Pipeworx gateway at https://gateway.pipeworx.io/mcp.

The pack endpoint lists the Data Europa tools along with shared Pipeworx gateway tools. Those shared tools include routing and discovery functions such as ask_pipeworx, while the standalone package exposes only the Data Europa tools. The hosted pack and full gateway reach the same gateway and data sources; they differ in which tools are listed directly.

For clients or scripts that do not use MCP, the gateway provides HTTP tool calls. For example, a search can be sent as a POST request to /v1/tools/data_europa_search with a JSON body containing a query value.

Setup and configuration

Add the hosted endpoint as an MCP server in a compatible client:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "data-europa": {
      "url": "https://gateway.pipeworx.io/data-europa/mcp"
    }
  }
}

The package also supports local stdio execution through npm. Configure the client to run npx -y @pipeworx/mcp-data-europa. This local mode needs no Pipeworx account and communicates over stdin and stdout. It uses the same source and pack tools, but does not include gateway meta-tools or cross-catalog routing.

Tools and capabilities

The exposed Data Europa operations are:

• search(query, fq?, rows?, start?, sort?): search dataset packages with optional filtering, pagination, and sorting parameters.
• package(id): retrieve a single package by its ID.
• organizations(limit?): list publishing organizations.
• groups(limit?): list dataset themes or groups.
• tags(query?, limit?): list tags or search for matching tags.

The hosted gateway also supports ask_pipeworx, which lets an agent submit a natural-language question for tool selection and argument filling. That routing capability is available through the pack endpoint and full gateway, not through the standalone local process.

The Data Europa MCP server is a fit for agents that need to search EU open-data catalogs, identify publishers or themes, inspect dataset metadata, or use tags to narrow discovery.