FCSC MCP Server

An MCP server that exposes official UAE statistics from the Federal Competitiveness and Statistics Centre (FCSC) as tools an AI assistant can call.

It acts as the bridge between Claude and the FCSC SDMX API: Claude never calls FCSC directly. It invokes a tool here, this server calls the FCSC endpoint, and the response is returned as readable, labelled data. FCSC credentials stay in this server's environment and are never exposed to the model.

Status

The tool layer is complete and tested against local stubs. It has not yet returned live FCSC data — see Known blocker below.

Tools

Tool	Purpose
listDatasets	Discover available datasets, filtered by topic or free-text search.
getDatasetData	Fetch observations for one dataset as a labelled table.
getDatasetStructure	List a dataset's dimensions and codelists, for building filtered keys.

Rather than defining 50 near-identical tools, the server is driven by datasets.json — a manifest of 50 FCSC dataflows spanning Economy, Social and Environment topics. Claude discovers what exists with listDatasets, then reads it with getDatasetData.

Setup

npm install
npm start

Register it with an MCP client (stdio transport):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "fcsc-statistics": {
      "command": "node",
      "args": ["/absolute/path/to/my-mcp-server/server.js"]
    }
  }
}

Environment variables

Variable	Purpose
FCSC_BASE_URL	Override the API base URL. Useful for pointing at a test stub.
FCSC_API_KEY	Sent as Ocp-Apim-Subscription-Key if FCSC issue an API key.

Regenerating the dataset manifest

datasets.json is generated from the FCSC deep-links spreadsheet:

npm run build:manifest -- "/path/to/FCSC- MOBILE APP- Deep links.xlsx"

The generator scans the three URL columns for the first /rest/data/ URL and normalises it to the flat (dimensionAtObservation=AllDimensions) flavour itself, rather than trusting the spreadsheet's "SDMX flavour (Flat)" column — that column has known defects, including one row shifted a column right and 19 rows whose time-series URL duplicates the flat one.

Two rows (Vital Statistics → Birth, Death) carry no URL at all and are reported as skipped.

Known blocker

The FCSC hosts sit behind Cloudflare bot protection, which returns HTTP 403 to every non-browser client — the whole domain, not just the API paths. A browser User-Agent does not help.

The API itself is live and serving: an external request reached DF_LFUNEMP_ED and received HTTP 200 with SDMX-ML. So the barrier is Cloudflare sitting between a program and the API, not the API itself.

Needed from FCSC: a machine-usable path to the API — an API key, a service account, or allowlisting for the server — plus confirmation of which response format the service will serve.

The server negotiates for SDMX-JSON, falls back to SDMX-CSV, and detects SDMX-ML and reports it rather than failing silently. If FCSC only ever serve SDMX-ML, an XML parsing path needs adding.

Layout

server.js                  MCP server and tool definitions
fcsc.js                    URL building, HTTP, SDMX parsing, table rendering
datasets.json              Generated manifest of 50 FCSC dataflows
scripts/build-manifest.py  Regenerates datasets.json from the spreadsheet