metadata

title: 🏘️ Mcp Census
emoji: 🏘️
colorFrom: yellow
colorTo: indigo
sdk: gradio
sdk_version: 5.33.0
app_file: app.py
pinned: false
short_description: MCP server leveraging U.S. Census Bureau tooling
tags:
  - mcp-server-track

mcp-census

A work-in-progress MCP server leveraging U.S. Census Bureau tooling for LLM interoperability.

Example usage

Right now, we recommend using mcp-census in conjunction with a MCP Client like Claude Desktop or Cursor. If you prefer to run your own client application, check out Local Agent Quickstart.

What is the population of Hennepin County, MN for those who are 65 and older?

https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/c979b9aa-8299-4eec-ad32-362d28ced5e4

What is the racial/ethnic breakdown of Yolo County?

https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/d7c34ecb-4503-4bde-a7eb-b865a6f076c8

Lookup data from the US 2020 Decennial Census and provide a CSV containing data about the number of housing units, total population, and median age for all counties in New York State. For the column containing the county identifier, please provide a complete FIPS containing the state and county as a joined value.

https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/cffd80f0-0830-4534-ab1a-9574608967ad

Local MCP server quickstart

We suggest using uv to manage dependencies, but you can install the required packages directly from the pyproject.toml file

uv run python app.py

Assuming you have no other gradio applications running, this will serve your MCP server at http://localhost:7860/gradio_api/mcp/sse

MCP architecture

Possible improvements

Evaluation

We recommend starting here to provide a strong benchmark with which to evaluate improvements.
MCP server tools can be evaluated via unit tests. Agentic behavior can be evaluated on criteria described here and emerging frameworks such as RAGAS.

MCP Client

Rather than build tool sets for every Census dataset (decennial, american community survey, etc.), it may be more comprensive to build tooling around the machine readable dataset discovery tool.
The Census Bureau publishes myriad documentation. Enabling semantic retrieval via RAG should provide agents with information to better respond to user queries.