Natural language queries with LLMs via MCP servers

[Schaaff Andre]

Hello Tim and all

At CDS we (Thomas Boch, Sébastien Derrière and myself) worked on a MCP 
server implementation and configuration in the frame of the R&D around 
chatbots and AI for astronomical services and tools.

  Even if it was continued  since Görlitz, Thomas had a talk in the 
joint DCP/KD Session in November 2025 to give an overview of the ongoing 
effort in this frame

https://wiki.ivoa.net/twiki/bin/view/IVOA/InterOpNov2025DCPKD

we will be happy to join discussions and  other actions

regards

André

Le 27/07/2026 à 17:09, Tim Jenness via interop a écrit :
> At the recent SPIE meeting in Copenhagen, Ashley Barnes from ESO gave 
> a talk on their experiments with teaching an LLM to query their data 
> archive. They looked at making a dedicated agent taught explicitly but 
> this cost them real money, and they looked at writing markdown 
> instructions that the LLM could read to learn about the specifics of 
> the archive center. This led me to ponder whether we should be talking 
> about some kind of standardized MCP server interface 
> (https://modelcontextprotocol.io/docs/getting-started/intro) that an 
> LLM could query to work things out about the archive.
>
> This seems to be the way that many services are heading (my photos 
> application has an MCP server to let an LLM look for photos 
> efficiently). On the one hand we have all these open protocols so that 
> in theory an LLM can work it all out and form the right query for a 
> TAP server by querying registry and looking at TAP_SCHEMA, and that 
> should work. MCP /might/ be able to let an agent do the same thing but 
> using fewer tokens, even if the end point is the agent sending off a 
> TAP query.
>
> Is anyone else thinking about this? Can someone from ESO ask Ashley to 
> join IVOA Slack to discuss this?
>
> Each data center could put their own MCP server up with their own 
> targeted API and that might be fine, but pooling our experience in 
> terms of what helped and what made things worse would be really 
> helpful and if we end up with an IVOA Note containing advice on 
> natural language queries that would be great. If we ended up with a 
> standardized vocabulary for MCP servers that might be even better.
>
> -- 
> Tim Jenness
> Rubin Observatory

-- 
Andre Schaaff
Responsable R&D du CDS
Observatoire Astronomique de Strasbourg (ObAS)
UMR 7550 Universite de Strasbourg - CNRS
11, rue de l'Universite
F-67000 Strasbourg
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