MCP Server

The optional MCP server exposes prismAId’s tools to agents over stdio, so an assistant can help a user design, validate, run, and check a systematic review through the same primitives the library and CLI use.

The server supports three usage patterns:

• local installation from the Go source
• container-based execution from the GHCR image
• registry-based use through the MCP Registry

Available tools

The tools fall into three groups.

Design and setup — offline, no API keys, safe on drafts:

• prismaid_validate_config — validate a review, screening, or zotero configuration.
• prismaid_generate_review_config — build a review-tool TOML from structured parameters.
• prismaid_generate_screening_config — build a screening-tool TOML from structured parameters.
• prismaid_generate_zotero_config — build a Zotero-download TOML from structured parameters.

Protocol conformance — symbolic check against the latest shapes RevAIse publishes; needs network, but no API keys or file access (see Protocol Conformance):

• prismaid_check_conformance — check a RevAIse record against a protocol’s SHACL shapes.
• prismaid_list_protocols — list the accepted protocol identifiers.
• prismaid_protocol_guidance — return a protocol’s full requirement checklist, grouped by record class, so a user can plan a conforming review before running anything (see Protocol Guidance). Advisory; it does not constrain the order in which tools are used.

Execution — read and write files, use the network, and read LLM API keys from the environment:

• prismaid_review — run a systematic review.
• prismaid_screening — screen manuscripts.
• prismaid_convert — convert PDF/DOCX/HTML files to plain text.
• prismaid_download_zotero — download attachments from a Zotero collection.
• prismaid_download_url_list — download files from a list of URLs.

Agents discover tool schemas via tools/list and call them with tools/call. The generator tools accept the same structured parameters as prismAId’s Go configuration generators, so an agent can author a configuration field by field, validate it, and then run it — all in one session.

Running execution tools

The design, generator, and conformance tools are self-contained. The execution tools are not: they read and write files and call LLM providers. Two conventions apply when running the server in a container:

• File paths are resolved inside the server’s own filesystem. A configuration’s input_directory, results_file_name, and similar paths must refer to paths the server can see. When running the container, bind-mount the working directory (for example -v "$PWD":/work) and use the mounted paths in the configuration.
• API keys come from the environment. Provider keys placed in the configuration are used as-is; otherwise the standard provider environment variables must be passed into the server process (for example -e OPENAI_API_KEY).

Use from Go source

Use this when you want a local binary built directly from the project source (see also the Go Package installation page).

go install github.com/open-and-sustainable/prismaid/cmd/prismaid-mcp@latest
prismaid-mcp

Use from the GHCR container image

Use this when you want to run the MCP server without a local Go toolchain.

docker pull ghcr.io/open-and-sustainable/prismaid-mcp:0.15.0
docker run --rm -i \
  -v "$PWD":/work -e OPENAI_API_KEY \
  ghcr.io/open-and-sustainable/prismaid-mcp:0.15.0

Replace 0.15.0 with the released version you want to run. The bind-mount and environment flags are only needed for the execution tools.

Use from the MCP Registry

Use this when your agent platform supports MCP Registry server discovery and installation.

The prismAId MCP server is published by GitHub Actions on pushed version tags such as v0.15.0, using GitHub OIDC authentication and the registry publisher CLI. The registry entry points to the published OCI package, so agents resolve a versioned package rather than a repository source tree.

Registry references:

• Discovery page: https://registry.modelcontextprotocol.io/?q=prismaid
• Server ID: io.github.open-and-sustainable/prismaid-mcp

Example requests

Example tools/list request:

{ "jsonrpc": "2.0", "id": 1, "method": "tools/list" }

Example tools/call request (validate a review configuration):

{
  "jsonrpc": "2.0",
  "id": 2,
  "method": "tools/call",
  "params": {
    "name": "prismaid_validate_config",
    "arguments": {
      "config_type": "review",
      "toml": "[project]\nname = \"demo\"\n..."
    }
  }
}

In all cases, clients interact with the server through standard MCP tools/list and tools/call requests.