Soundings

Data for local decision-making

About Soundings

Soundings is an MCP server wrapping a curated set of UK open data sources behind a small surface of question-shaped tools. Ask about a place — postcode, council, region — and get coherent answers grounded in named sources.

How capture works

Every interaction with the server is logged as a structured record, with your consent. The published corpus becomes a public artefact in its own right under CC BY 4.0.

  • Full consent — your question text and self-declared sector are captured. The text is sanitised before publication (postcodes truncated to sector, personal names redacted via NER, small-charity names stripped).
  • Minimal consent — only the structured fields are captured: which tool was called, the place, the indicators returned. Your question text is never stored.
  • No consent — nothing is captured. You can still use the server.

Nothing is captured until you make a choice. The sharing control shown across the site lets you change that choice at any time; changing it starts a fresh corpus session.

The corpus

Sanitised snapshots of the question corpus can be published as gzipped CSV and JSON Lines. The manifest records SHA-256 hashes, the catalogue version, the sanitisation rules version, and the git commit that produced it — so you can audit exactly what went in.

Snapshot publication is currently operator-run: v1 writes local artefacts and does not automatically push them to a hosted bucket. See ADR-0004 . You can browse recent cleared questions at /corpus.

The data behind every answer

Every page that shows indicator values also shows the SourceRef for each one: where it came from, when we retrieved it, and what cache status it has. A collapsed "data behind this" panel shows the raw tool call and response so you can see what the UI saw.

Compare and trend

Each place page sparkline-charts the trend for any indicator whose source publishes a time series, so you can see direction and recent change alongside the latest value. The /compare page accepts a comma-separated list of places and indicators and ranks each highlighted place against the full same-type peer universe — percentile by default, with rank, absolute, and rate bases also available.

Civil society

Place pages also show the registered charities operating in that area and the grants they've received in the last twelve months. Local organisation discovery currently uses the Charity Commission's monthly register for England & Wales; Scottish and Northern Irish place-level discovery is a known coverage gap. Grant records come from 360Giving.

Links