Datacommons MCP server

@pipeworx/datacommons

Harmonised public statistics for any place on Earth from Google Data Commons: population, income, health, employment, emissions and thousands more indicators. Every value names the original publisher (US Census, World Bank, Eurostat, CDC, BLS, ...).

Part of Pipeworx — an MCP gateway connecting AI agents to 1800+ live data sources. This is an independent, unofficial integration — not affiliated with, endorsed by, or published by the upstream provider.

Tools

Data Commons place ids (dcids), with name and type for each candidate. "California" + State gives geoId/06. "India" gives country/IND.

• datacommonsfindplace(name, place_type?, limit?): turns a place name into

into statistical variable ids, with a match score. "median household income" gives MedianIncomeHousehold.

• datacommonsfindvariable(query, limit?): turns a plain-language indicator

place. Returns the latest value (default), the value at a date, or the whole series with date=all. The response carries the publisher of the value and how many other sources report it, plus the latest value from up to five of them.

• datacommons_observation(variable, place, date?, limit?): one variable at one

one variable across every child place of a parent, sorted by value. Use it for all US states, every county in Texas (geoId/48, County) or every country in europe.

• datacommonschildplaces(variable, parentplace, childtype, date?, sort?, limit?):

A place/variable pair with no data is an error that names both ids. It never comes back as an empty list.

Auth

Platform key (PLATFORMDATACOMMONSKEY) with a BYO override through _apiKey, which is sent upstream as the X-API-Key header. Through the gateway, callers without a key use ours. Anyone importing the package directly needs a free Data Commons key from https://apikeys.datacommons.org (self-serve, no approval step). Without one, the pack refuses with "requires an API key" before any upstream request.

Data sources

official statistics from national and international publishers. Each value's publisher object names the dataset, measurement method and the publisher's provenance page.

• Google Data Commons, the Data Commons knowledge graph (REST v2). It aggregates

Reuse terms: this pack calls the API live for each request and keeps no copy. Each value stays under its original publisher's terms, and the publisher object on every response links to that publisher's provenance page.

Notes for the next person:

population was 340.0M from Census PEP and 334.9M from the ACS 5-year survey. The pack takes Data Commons' own ranking (first facet with observations) and shows the alternates, so the caller can see the spread.

• Most indicators have several sources ("facets") that disagree. In 2024, US

about a dozen US towns. Pass place_type to narrow it.

• Name resolution is fuzzy. "Paris" returns NUTS region FR101 first and then

back to topics. The pack keeps only StatisticalVariable hits and sets low_confidence when the best score is under 0.7.

• The indicator resolver always returns something, even for nonsense, so it falls

for a one-off smoke test, not for serving callers.

• Data Commons publishes a rate-limited trial key in its own docs. It is good

Quick Start

Add to your MCP client (Claude Desktop, Cursor, Windsurf, etc.):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "datacommons": {
      "url": "https://gateway.pipeworx.io/datacommons/mcp"
    }
  }
}

What this endpoint actually serves

Shortened. The full README is on GitHub.