Natural language queries with LLMs via MCP servers

[Berriman, Graham (Bruce)]

Hello Everyone

We are investigating the benefits of Agentic AI for KOA. Right now we are working with harness engineering. We have not implemented MCP, but definitely interested in standardization.

Bruce

Bruce Berriman | Scientist | Caltech/IPAC-NExScI





On Jul 27, 2026, at 8:09 AM, Tim Jenness via interop <interop at ivoa.net> wrote:

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

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