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<div><span style="font-size: 16px; font-family: Aptos, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Hello Everyone</span></div>
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<div><font face="Aptos, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="3">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.</font></div>
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<div><font face="Aptos, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="3">Bruce</font></div>
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<div><span style="font-style: normal; font-size: 14px;"><b>Bruce Berriman | Scientist<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><font color="#ff9300">| Caltech/IPAC-NExScI</font></b></span></div>
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<div>On Jul 27, 2026, at 8:09 AM, Tim Jenness via interop <interop@ivoa.net> wrote:</div>
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<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">https://modelcontextprotocol.io/docs/getting-started/intro</a></span></font>)
that an LLM could query to work things out about the archive.
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<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>
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<div dir="ltr">Is anyone else thinking about this? Can someone from ESO ask Ashley to join IVOA Slack to discuss this?</div>
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<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>
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<div dir="ltr">-- </div>
<div dir="ltr">Tim Jenness</div>
<div dir="ltr">Rubin Observatory</div>
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