Mobus

Dataset search for AI assistants Discover, preview, and analyze datasets across 20 platforms from a single conversation.

Connect to Claude

Add Mobus to Claude in under a minute. No install, no API keys, nothing to run.

1. Open claude.ai (or Claude Desktop / Mobile)
2. Go to Settings from the bottom left → Connectors
3. Click Add custom connector
4. Name it Mobus and paste this URL:

https://mcp.mobus.ai/mcp

1. Start a new chat and try:

"Search for air quality datasets with a commercial license"

That's it. All 15 tools are available immediately.

What it does

Just ask your AI assistant.

"Search for air-quality datasets with a commercial license" "Preview the first 20 rows of that Zenodo dataset" "Find SEC filings mentioning climate risk" "Generate an APA citation for that Hugging Face dataset" "Check if this dataset can be used commercially" "Visualize that dataset"

Mobus fans requests out to every configured platform in parallel, checks licenses, previews data, generates citations, and traces academic lineage — failing gracefully whenever an API key is missing.

Tools

Discovery

• search_datasets — search all 20 platforms at once
• find_research_datasets — datasets used in papers
• find_similar — datasets similar to one you have

Evaluation

• get_dataset_details — full metadata
• preview_dataset — first N rows
• compare_datasets — 2-5 side by side

Quality & Compliance

• assess_quality — missing values, duplicates, stats
• check_license — commercial / academic / internal
• check_compatibility — schema match against yours

Citation & Output

• generate_citation — APA, BibTeX, Chicago
• visualize_dataset (Only works locally - ask Claude to generate an artifact). — interactive ECharts dashboard
• watch_query — monitor for new datasets

Advanced Research

• get_dataset_provenance — introducing paper & history
• get_dataset_lineage — variants & derivatives
• trace_citation_graph — citation chain analysis

Supported platforms

No auth needed

• data.gov
• Zenodo
• OpenML
• UCI ML Repository
• AWS Open Data
• World Bank
• WHO GHO
• NASA Earthdata
• Eurostat
• arXiv
• Census.gov
• SEC EDGAR
• Crossref
• Harvard Dataverse

Optional auth

• Hugging Face (faster w/ token)
• Socrata (faster w/ token)
• Semantic Scholar

Requires key

• Kaggle
• Google Dataset Search

Degraded

• Papers with Code (API shut down)
• Econdb (now requires key)

Missing keys automatically skip that platform. The server never crashes.

Run locally (optional)

If you prefer to self-host instead of using the hosted version above:

git clone https://github.com/hrantvirabyan/Mobus.git
cd Mobus
npm install
cp .env.example .env   # fill in any keys you have (all optional)
npm run build

Cursor

Add to ~/.cursor/mcp.json:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "mobus": {
      "command": "node",
      "args": ["/absolute/path/to/Mobus/dist/main.js"]
    }
  }
}

Restart Cursor. All 15 tools appear in the chat.

Claude Desktop

Same config format, in ~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json (macOS) or %APPDATA%\Claude\claude_desktop_config.json (Windows).

API keys (all optional)

Tool reference

search_datasets

get_dataset_details

preview_dataset

visualize_dataset (Only works locally - ask Claude to generate an artifact)

Generates an interactive ECharts dashboard with column picker, filter builder, row range selector, 9 chart types, sortable table, and PNG/SVG/CSV/JSON export.

compare_datasets

check_compatibility

find_similar

generate_citation

assess_quality

check_license

watch_query

find_research_datasets

get_dataset_provenance / trace_citation_graph / get_dataset_lineage

Currently degraded — depend on the Papers with Code API which has shut down.

Known issues

• Papers with Code API shut down post-HuggingFace acquisition — lineage/provenance/citation-graph tools return errors
• Econdb now requires a key — returns empty until support is added
• arXiv rate-limits under heavy parallel load (adapter uses 3s throttle)

Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.md. If Mobus saves you time, a GitHub star helps others find it.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.