Data Use License MCP

MCP server providing authoritative metadata on data-use licenses, government open-data terms, legal regimes (sui generis database rights, Crown Copyright, court-decision public-domain doctrines), and vendor TOS templates. Sibling to @ansvar/open-source-license-mcp (which covers software/code licenses).

Overview

Coverage is structured around four entity types:

• license — public licenses (CC family, EUPL, ODbL, etc.)
• terms — government open-data portal terms (NLOD, Etalab, IODL, OGL UK, DL-DE, etc.)
• legal_regime — sui generis database rights (EU 96/9/EC), Crown Copyright family, court-decision public-domain doctrines
• vendor_template — Westlaw / LexisNexis / Bloomberg / Wolters Kluwer / HeinOnline TOS templates

Installation

Via npm (stdio)

npm install -g @ansvar/data-use-license-mcp

Then add to your MCP client config:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "data-use-license": {
      "command": "data-use-license-mcp"
    }
  }
}

Via Ansvar Gateway (recommended for B2B)

Use https://gateway.ansvar.eu with OAuth — see gateway-deployment.md.

Tools

search_entities (premium)

Search across all entity types. Accepts human-readable values ("MIT", "Norwegian open data", "Westlaw").

Input: { query: string, entity_type?: "license" | "terms" | "legal_regime" | "vendor_template", jurisdiction?: string, limit?: number }

Output: { results: Array<{ id, entity_type, name, short_name, jurisdiction, summary, _citation }>, _meta }

get_entity (premium)

Retrieve full record by id (also accepts human-readable input).

Input: { entity_id: string }

Output: { entity: Entity | null, _citation: Citation | null, _meta }

check_compatibility (premium)

Pairwise compatibility verdict between two entities.

Input: { left_id: string, right_id: string }

Output: { verdict: "compatible" | "incompatible" | "conditionally_compatible" | "unknown", obligations_triggered, edge_metadata, _citation_left, _citation_right, _meta }

get_obligations (team)

Full obligations array with conditional triggers.

Input: { entity_id: string }

Output: { obligations: Array<{ id, title, text, mandatory, conditional_on }>, _citation, _meta }

search_vendor_templates (team)

Vendor TOS template lookup. Results carry quality_tier: amber baseline.

Input: { query: string, limit?: number }

Output: { results: Array<VendorResult>, _meta }

Source Attribution

Per-item _citation includes:

• source_url — canonical authority URL
• publisher — bare hostname or canonical name
• license — SPDX-style code (registered in infrastructure/attribution-licenses.json in the Ansvar architecture-docs repo)
• canonical_ref, display_text, lookup, attribution_text

Per-response _meta includes:

• disclaimer, data_age (ISO-8601), source_url, jurisdiction, corpus_freshness

Development

npm install
export ATTRIBUTION_LICENSES_PATH=/path/to/Ansvar-Architecture-Documentation/infrastructure/attribution-licenses.json
npm run build:db
npm run build
npm test

Run locally (stdio):

node dist/index.js

Run locally (HTTP, port 3000):

npm start

License

Apache-2.0