Part of the Swiss Public Data MCP Portfolio — a collection of open-source MCP servers connecting AI agents to Swiss public and open data. This is a private project. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or operated on behalf of any employer or public authority.

i14y-mcp

MCP server for the I14Y interoperability platform — Switzerland's national metadata catalogue.

🇩🇪 Deutsche Version

Why this server exists

The other servers in this portfolio answer «what does the data say?». This one answers the question that comes first: «who publishes data on this topic, through which interface, under which licence?»

I14Y is the national data catalogue maintained by the Federal Statistical Office. It describes datasets, registered APIs, public services and harmonised concepts from the Confederation, cantons and communes, using the DCAT-AP-CH profile (eCH-0200).

Mnemonic: «Catalogue before shelf.» Without a catalogue, an agent has to already know a data source exists. With one, it can find it.

🎯 Anchor Demo Query

«Which authority publishes data on special needs education, through which interface is it available, and under which licence?»

search_catalog(query="Sonderpädagogik")
  → «Statistik der Sonderpädagogik» — Federal Statistical Office (BFS), theme: Bildung

get_dataset(dataset_id=...)
  → 2 distributions, licence: «Opendata BY ASK — attribution required,
    commercial use only with permission from the data supplier»
  → contact: auskunftsdienst@bfs.admin.ch

Two tool calls turn a vague topic into a named authority, a download URL and a licence you can act on — get_dataset aggregates the distributions, licences and contact point into one record.

Demo

Architecture

                 ┌──────────────────────────────┐
                 │      MCP Host (Claude)       │
                 └───────────────┬──────────────┘
                                 │ stdio | streamable-http
                 ┌───────────────▼──────────────┐
                 │          i14y-mcp            │
                 │  ┌────────────────────────┐  │
                 │  │ server.py  (13 tools)  │  │
                 │  ├────────────────────────┤  │
                 │  │ mappers.py             │  │  DCAT → flat, one language
                 │  ├────────────────────────┤  │
                 │  │ models.py  (Pydantic)  │  │  source + provenance envelope
                 │  ├────────────────────────┤  │
                 │  │ client.py              │  │  retry 2s/4s/8s, no-retry 4xx
                 │  └────────────────────────┘  │
                 └───────────────┬──────────────┘
                                 │ HTTPS, no auth
                 ┌───────────────▼──────────────┐
                 │  api.i14y.admin.ch/api       │
                 │  datasets · dataservices ·   │
                 │  concepts · publicservices · │
                 │  catalogs · agents · search  │
                 └──────────────────────────────┘

Architecture decision

This server uses Architecture A (live API only).

Rationale (verified live on 2026-07-21):

• All read endpoints respond without authentication and paginate correctly.
• No bulk download of catalogue metadata is offered, and none is needed.
• Error responses follow RFC 7807, so failure modes are distinguishable.

Consequences:

• Every HTTP call retries transient failures with 2 s / 4 s / 8 s backoff.
• search_catalog caps results client-side because the upstream ignores paging.
• api_status always returns an evaluable state instead of empty records.

Full probe report: docs/probe-i14y.md.

Project phase

This server is in Phase 1 (read-only) of the portfolio's «Read-only First» phase architecture: all tools are read-only, there is no authentication and no personal data. See docs/roadmap.md for the phase model and the prerequisites for any future write capability.

Tools

All tools are annotated readOnlyHint: true. Write operations exist in the upstream API but are deliberately not exposed.

MCP primitives

This server exposes Tools only — no Resources, no Prompts. That is a deliberate choice, not an omission: I14Y is queried by free-text search and by opaque UUIDs, so there is no small, stable set of addressable URIs that would map cleanly onto MCP Resources, and the server ships no opinionated prompt templates. Every tool is read-only and idempotent; if a future stable entry point emerges (e.g. a fixed theme list) it is a candidate for a Resource.

MCP protocol version

Built against the MCP Python SDK (mcp >= 1.28.1), which negotiates the protocol version with the client at initialize time. The tested SDK floor is pinned in pyproject.toml; Dependabot opens monthly SDK-update PRs, and any change that bumps the negotiated spec version is called out in CHANGELOG.md.

MCP Protocol Version

This server speaks two protocol eras over the same endpoint. The client's first request on a connection decides which one applies; a later claim from the other era is refused.

Both revisions are pinned in tests/test_protocol_version.py and asserted against the installed SDK, so a Dependabot bump of mcp cannot move either one silently. The handshake ceiling is measured against a live initialize through the assembled ASGI stack, not read off a constant name.

Note that the SDK's LATEST_PROTOCOL_VERSION is an alias for the modern era, not for the handshake era — pinning against it alone would leave the era that current clients actually negotiate free to drift.

Update policy. When the gate fails, do not edit the constant blindly: read the spec changelog between the two revisions, verify the server still behaves, then move the constant, this section, README.de.md and CHANGELOG.md together.

Installation

uvx i14y-mcp

Or from source:

git clone https://github.com/malkreide/i14y-mcp
cd i14y-mcp
pip install -e ".[dev]"

Claude Desktop

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "i14y": {
      "command": "uvx",
      "args": ["i14y-mcp"]
    }
  }
}

Remote deployment (Render, Railway)

I14Y_MCP_TRANSPORT=sse HOST=0.0.0.0 PORT=8000 i14y-mcp

I14Y_MCP_TRANSPORT accepts stdio (default), sse or streamable-http. The HTTP transports bind to HOST, which defaults to 127.0.0.1 (loopback); set HOST=0.0.0.0 to expose the port on a PaaS (the Docker image already does). CORS exposes the Mcp-Session-Id header so browser MCP clients keep their session. Which browser origins may call the server comes from I14Y_MCP_CORS_ORIGINS, a comma-separated list — unset means no browser client is permitted at all, which is the default. * is still accepted and logs a warning. stdio and other non-browser clients are unaffected either way.

Docker

docker compose up --build      # SSE transport on http://localhost:8000

The image is a hardened multi-stage build: it runs as a non-root user, ships no build tools, and needs no secrets (the API is unauthenticated). See Dockerfile and compose.yaml.

Join keys

I14Y is a connector layer. Two identifiers make it composable with the rest of the portfolio:

Known limitations

Verified live on 2026-07-21.