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<p>Hello Tim and all</p>
<p>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. </p>
<p> 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</p>
<p><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://wiki.ivoa.net/twiki/bin/view/IVOA/InterOpNov2025DCPKD">https://wiki.ivoa.net/twiki/bin/view/IVOA/InterOpNov2025DCPKD</a></p>
<p>we will be happy to join discussions and other actions </p>
<p>regards</p>
<p>André</p>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">Le 27/07/2026 à 17:09, Tim Jenness via
interop a écrit :<br>
</div>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:CAJcbMhm+C4J8AiS9GTUetW3yzdf+4SySLg4ReNR8K47wTVd5fA@mail.gmail.com">
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
<div dir="ltr">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 (<font color="#419cff"><span
style="-webkit-text-fill-color: rgb(65, 156, 255) !important;"><a
href="https://modelcontextprotocol.io/docs/getting-started/intro"
moz-do-not-send="true" class="moz-txt-link-freetext">https://modelcontextprotocol.io/docs/getting-started/intro</a></span></font>)
that an LLM could query to work things out about the archive.
<div><br>
</div>
<div dir="ltr">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
<i>might</i> 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.</div>
<div dir="ltr"><br>
</div>
<div dir="ltr">Is anyone else thinking about this? Can someone
from ESO ask Ashley to join IVOA Slack to discuss this?</div>
<div dir="ltr"><br>
</div>
<div dir="ltr">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.</div>
<div dir="ltr"><br>
</div>
<div dir="ltr">-- </div>
<div dir="ltr">Tim Jenness</div>
<div dir="ltr">Rubin Observatory</div>
</div>
</blockquote>
<pre class="moz-signature" cols="72">--
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</pre>
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