MCP Atlas

What mcp-atlas does

mcp-atlas exposes UrbanKit Studio's atlas of verified public GIS sources through MCP. Its primary use is county parcel research: an agent can determine whether a county is covered, inspect its ArcGIS REST service, identify searchable fields, and create a query for an owner or taxpayer name. The atlas covers counties across the 50 US states and the District of Columbia, with records that distinguish owner-name searches from APN-only or location-based access.

A separate city-focused tool finds verified datasets for code violations, building permits, and zoning cases. It can identify the relevant public endpoint, address field, date field, coverage notes, and a query URL for a street.

How it works

The county workflow depends on how precisely the county is known:

• list_counties filters the atlas by state abbreviation or full state name and reports county slugs plus the available search type.
• find_county accepts a vague, misspelled, state-qualified, or five-digit FIPS reference and returns every matching county with its technical record.
• get_parcel_endpoint accepts an exact state and county and returns the ArcGIS service URL, layer index, searchable fields, owner field details, scope predicates, a generic query example, and an UrbanKit link.
• build_owner_query inserts a person or company name into the reviewed owner or taxpayer field and returns a URL using a case-insensitive partial match.

For shared statewide or regional layers, the generated owner query includes the county-specific scope condition. The resulting URL can be fetched in a browser or by application code. The server itself only constructs and describes the query; it does not execute it or return parcel rows.

get_city_datasets follows a different path. It accepts a city and optional dataset kind or street, then returns ready-to-run queries for supported violations, permits, or zoning datasets hosted by Socrata, ArcGIS, CKAN, or CARTO.

Setup and configuration

Run the package through npx in an MCP client's stdio configuration:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "mcp-atlas": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@urbankitstudio/mcp-atlas"]
    }
  }
}

Claude Desktop uses its platform-specific configuration file, while Cursor can use .cursor/mcp.json in a project or the global Cursor configuration. The package may also be installed globally with npm; after that, mcp-atlas can be used as the command. No API key is required, and no environment variables are needed for the documented setup.

Tools and capabilities

• Browse county coverage and owner-search availability.
• Resolve ambiguous county names, misspellings, and FIPS codes.
• Retrieve verified ArcGIS REST URLs, layer indexes, fields, scopes, and sample queries.
• Build owner or taxpayer name searches with county-specific restrictions.
• Discover city street-query datasets for violations, permits, and zoning cases.
• Produce URLs for the caller to fetch from the relevant public data service.

Limitations and notes

Coverage varies by county. Some records offer only parcel numbers, some support location queries rather than attribute searches, and some owner fields cannot be searched by name. A county may also be recorded as unavailable because it publishes no usable endpoint or restricts public display.

build_owner_query refuses unsupported owner searches and explains the reason. It can exclude rows marked as confidential where the reviewed layer provides the relevant flag. The generated owner search is a partial LIKE match and follows the atlas's uppercase matching behavior.

The tools return metadata and query URLs, not parcel or city records. Callers must make the follow-up request themselves and should preserve any returned scope or filtering clauses when constructing their own queries.