Space Frontiers

You can access Space Frontiers data sources through an MCP server that exposes four core tools for searching, resolving identifiers, and retrieving documents or metadata. This MCP server lets you explore scholarly literature, Wikipedia, social feeds, and multimedia sources via a unified interface, making it easy to build language-model-powered workflows that discover, filter, and contextualize Space Frontiers content.

How to use

Use an MCP client to connect to Space Frontiers MCP Server and start querying across sources. You begin with a semantic search to locate relevant documents, then optionally resolve identifiers to standard URIs, fetch metadata for fast overviews, and retrieve filtered content from specific documents. The typical pattern is: search for a topic, resolve any given identifier to a URI, get metadata for quick context, and finally request content filtered by your query to obtain targeted snippets.

How to install

Prerequisites: you need Node.js and a runtime capable of running MCP servers or a client that can communicate with an MCP endpoint. Ensure you have network access to the Space Frontiers MCP server if you plan to use the hosted endpoint.

1. Prepare the runtime and environment. Set up environment variables as needed for authentication and limits.

2. Start the MCP server locally if you are running it in your environment using the provided runtime command. The final startup command shown here starts the server with the MCP runtime and loads the main server script.

Additional notes

Configuration supports two connection methods. You can connect to the hosted MCP server URL or run a local MCP instance that serves the server via a standard runtime. The hosted endpoint is https://mcp.spacefrontiers.org and is intended for quick access with an API key. If you run locally, you typically invoke a runtime command that launches the MCP server script.

Environment variables shown in the examples include your API key and optional snippet limits for content retrieval. When you run locally, you should ensure the API key is available to your client or passed in request headers.

Example configuration for a local runtime is provided to illustrate how to wire a client to the server. The configuration includes the runtime command, arguments, and environment variables for API access and snippet limits.

Tools and capabilities

The server provides four core tools for LLM-assisted discovery and retrieval across multiple sources: search, resolve_id, get_document, and get_document_metadata. Use search to locate relevant documents, resolve_id to standardize identifiers into URIs with source information, get_document_metadata to fetch basic metadata quickly, and get_document to retrieve content snippets filtered by a query.

Available tools

search

Perform semantic search across multiple Space Frontiers sources to find relevant documents and return IDs and snippets.

resolve_id

Convert document identifiers such as DOIs, ISBNs, PubMed IDs, or URLs into standardized URIs with source information.

get_document_metadata

Retrieve fast, metadata-only information for a document, including title, authors, abstract, and references, without fetching content.

get_document

Retrieve filtered content from a specific document using its URI and a query, returning only snippets that match the query.