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Islam West Africa Collection (IWAC) MCP Server

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Islam West Africa Collection (IWAC) is answering right now. Last checked 13 min ago. It exposes 39 tools. Last commit 3 Nov 2026.

Read-only access to the Islam West Africa Collection via Hugging Face datasets.

Uptime history 91 days of history
91 days agonow
100.0%
Uptime 24h
91 of 91 checks
39
Tools
read from the server
263 ms
Response time
average over 24h
2
Stars
last commit 3 Nov 2026

What changed 138

Every tool that appeared, vanished or quietly changed what it asks for. Recorded since 11 August 2026. No other catalogue keeps this.

2 Nov 2 tool descriptions were rewritten get_country_comparison, search_by_sentiment
2 Nov 2 tools changed the parameters they ask for get_semantic_map, get_sentiment_distribution
2 Nov a tool changed version
29 Oct 39 tools changed the parameters they ask for explore_corpus, fetch, get_article and 36 more
29 Oct a tool changed version
29 Oct a tool description was rewritten search_references
27 Oct a tool description was rewritten explore_corpus
27 Oct a tool changed version
26 Oct 2 tool descriptions were rewritten list_locations, list_persons
26 Oct a tool changed version
and 87 more, back to 11 August 2026

What the code does

We read the source, 4 d ago · tools taken from the live server · rules 995398eba69f

Capabilities

What this server is able to do. For an MCP server this is often the job itself — a terminal server runs commands because that is what it is for. Listed so you know what you are plugging in, not as an accusation.

Builds a file path from a variable mcpb/src/encoderWorker.ts:46
  const read = (name: string) => JSON.parse(readFileSync(path.join(dir, name), "utf8"));
Long encoded blob in source mcpb/src/embeddingProbe.ts:5
  "vector": "jjiYvSy8cr0lGyo8ubYhPREzHr29Kro78H0WPKEnKj0tD+M7tvDZvd6eXL0y4jG98uh0vXWIL7xdzhm9KVOdPbHYmT1rKFQ9qRFDPbDhoj06iti8EMp0vfbk3bvND+c7a4QivfePMLy9f5C7AHwhvYlwhbwxJTY+AhoLO8OVgDxxbxG8Un2Uveh9ijwSnLC8EC4hPbUwDTy053g97Wa3vHaQlzx2MMo85kIEvcMHvTxnHPq6DmQAvRhUhj0dF7g87w/BPEQ337x…

Is this your server and something here is wrong? Tell us — corrections are free and do not require a plan.

This code can reach further than it looks

We found places where it runs commands, builds paths or queries from values it is given. None of that is a flaw by itself — it becomes one when the code changes, and code changes quietly between releases. We re-read it on every one.

Three servers free · no card

Connect this server

Endpoint below is the one we actually reach during checks — not the one copied from a README. Last verified 13 min ago.

run in your terminal
claude mcp add iwac-mcp-server --transport http https://islam.zmo.de/mcp/
Settings → Connectors → Add custom connector, then paste this address
https://islam.zmo.de/mcp/
~/.codex/config.toml
[mcp_servers.iwac-mcp-server]
url = "https://islam.zmo.de/mcp/"
.cursor/mcp.json
{
  "mcpServers": {
    "iwac-mcp-server": {
      "url": "https://islam.zmo.de/mcp/"
    }
  }
}
.vscode/mcp.json
{
  "servers": {
    "iwac-mcp-server": {
      "type": "http",
      "url": "https://islam.zmo.de/mcp/"
    }
  }
}

Available tools 39

Read directly from the server with tools/list, grouped by what they act on. If a tool disappears, we record the date.

semantic
get_semantic_map
Stable-hash sample of matching stored embeddings, projected with PCA. Reports eligible, invalid, missing and capped counts, seed and explained variance. Group counts describe the sample. Coordinates are chart-only; this is not the published UMAP landscape. Needs no API key.
semantic_search_articles
Semantic search over article title + full text, including articles whose OCR is not public. Query in any language. Runs the corpus model, EmbeddingGemma 2, locally with no API key (first use downloads ~350 MB). similarity_score only ranks within one query.
semantic_search_images
Find photographs by describing what they SHOW, in any language ('mosquée en construction', 'street signage in Arabic'). This is cross-modal: the ranking runs against a multimodal embedding of the photograph itself, not against a caption, so it works even though only 2 of the 30 images have one. Runs the corpus model, EmbeddingGemma 2, locally with no API key (first use downloads ~350 MB). similarity_score only ranks within one query.
semantic_search_publications
Semantic search over publication tables of contents, present for ~40% of issues (none for An-Nasr Vendredi, 130 of 695 Islam Info issues): use search_publications for the rest. Rows show the first 600 characters of each table. Query in any language. Runs the corpus model, EmbeddingGemma 2, locally with no API key (first use downloads ~350 MB). similarity_score only ranks within one query.
semantic_search_references
Semantic search over academic references by title + abstract, across languages. Only references with an abstract (about half) are covered; use search_references for the rest. Runs the corpus model, EmbeddingGemma 2, locally with no API key (first use downloads ~350 MB). similarity_score only ranks within one query.
audiovisual
get_audiovisual
Get one audiovisual record by id: full description and transcription (where one exists), creator/publishing channel, duration, medium, subjects, places, language, rights, source, and three distinct links: `url` (the IWAC page, the one to cite), `external_url` (where a harvested video plays) and `media_url` (a deposited file). `source_type` says which to expect. A long transcription comes in 25k-char parts (follow `next_offset`); `keyword` returns excerpts instead.
list_audiovisual
List audiovisual materials, newest first (francophone web video from Burkina Faso, Togo and Benin; deposited Nigerian Hausa/Arabic recordings). Filter by country, publishing channel or `source_type`.
search_audiovisual
Search audiovisual materials by keyword and metadata: francophone web video from Burkina Faso, Togo and Benin (TV reports, association and campus recordings), plus deposited Nigerian Hausa/Arabic recordings. Keyword matches title, creator, publisher, subject, spatial, language, source, the item's own description (the richest text most of these items have) and its transcription where one exists. Each row says which population it is from (`source_type`) and carries either `external_url` (a video to watch) or `media_url` (a file), never both.
index
get_index_entry
Get full details of an index entry by id (raw dataset columns, French names — Titre, Prénom, Coordonnées…).
search_index
Search the IWAC authority index (persons, places, organisations, events, subjects) by name. Accent/case-insensitive.
sentiment
get_sentiment_distribution
Aggregate AI labels over a shared selection. model:"all" compares independent annotators and their coverage; model:"consensus" reads the stored panel majority. Choose compare_models and agreement_field for pairwise Cohen's kappa and quadratic weighted kappa, with explicit denominators. Labels are interpretations, not ground truth; subjectivity is weak evidence and its caveat must accompany findings.
search_by_sentiment
Filter articles by claude-haiku-5-5 sentiment labels (accent/case-insensitive exact match). One model's reading, not a consensus — 5 other models scored the same articles and often disagree; get_sentiment_distribution with model:"all" shows by how much. `subjectivity` is much the weakest of the three scales, so treat a set selected on it as a lead to read rather than as a finding.
article
get_article
Get one article (by id): full metadata, the AI abstract (description_ai), AI sentiment, and OCR text, in 25k-char parts (follow `next_offset`). Pass a `keyword` to get ~2000-char excerpts around each match instead.
articles
search_articles
Search IWAC newspaper articles by keyword (title + OCR + AI abstracts, French and English), country, newspaper, subject, and date range. Use French concept keywords regardless of the user's report language. Matching is accent- and case-insensitive.
collection
get_collection_stats
Overall statistics for every IWAC subset, including `fulltext_coverage` — how many items in each subset actually carry searchable full text in this dataset. Read that before treating any keyword count as a full-text census.
cooccurrence
get_cooccurrence
Count pairs of metadata values co-tagged on the same items. Matrix/network views show descriptive associations, not causal links. Filters apply before pair counting; top_n caps the vocabulary.
country
get_country_comparison
Compare article counts, newspaper counts, date ranges, and claude-haiku-5-5 polarity across countries.
document
get_document
Get one archival document (by id): full metadata, AI description, and OCR text, in 25k-char parts (follow `next_offset`). Pass a `keyword` to get ~2000-char excerpts around each match instead, useful for long documents.
documents
search_documents
Search the small archival-documents subset (~26 items: Islamic association reports, flyers, project documents — mostly Burkina Faso). Use French concept keywords regardless of the user's report language. Most have OCR text and an AI description. Call with no arguments to list all.
explore
explore_corpus
Selection workbench: items, concordance, coverage, compare (requires comparison), attention, aliases, or paginated manifest/CSL-JSON/BibTeX exports. Exact filters intersect. limit/offset also page compare/coverage/attention cells. Coverage measures archive availability. Exports identify this page and dataset snapshot; compare snapshot IDs across pages. Schema discovery: iwac://datasets/{subset}.
fetch
fetch
Retrieve the full text and metadata of one IWAC item by an id returned from `search` (format '<category>:<number>', e.g. 'articles:28576'). Returns {id, title, text, url, metadata}: `text` is the item's OCR / abstract / transcription / description, `url` is the canonical islam.zmo.de link to cite, and `metadata` holds the remaining fields (author, date, country, newspaper, AI sentiment, …). Categories: articles, publications, references, documents, index, audiovisual, images.
field
get_field_distribution
Rank exact metadata values, splitting pipe-separated tags. Reports missing metadata and optional coverage over time. Choose spatial for mentioned places, country for stored country tags, or subject/author/language.
image
get_image
Get one photograph by id: title, photographer, capture date, place and coordinates, subjects, rights, the IIIF manifest, and the full-resolution `image_url`. The server returns URLs, not image bytes.
images
search_images
Search the IWAC photographs (30 items: mosques, radio stations, schools, signage and street scenes documented during fieldwork). Keyword matches title, creator, subject, place and the rare caption. Each result carries `image_url` (the full-resolution file), `coordinates` ('lat, lng' where known) and the canonical IWAC page. Call with no arguments to list all. Captions are almost never present, so prefer subject/place filters over keywords, or semantic_search_images when it is enabled.
lexical
get_lexical_metrics
Text length, lexical richness and readability by country/newspaper/year. Metrics are precomputed; readability is French-specific and excludes other languages. Missing values are disclosed. Compare distributions as descriptive evidence.
locations
list_locations
List lieux from the IWAC index, sorted by frequency (most-referenced first). The optional 'country' filter selects entries that APPEAR IN records from that country (mentioned-in, not located-in), ranked by collection-wide 'frequency' — so foreign and cross-border entries can appear. Nigeria reaches only the few entries its references mention (index frequency counts articles, publications and references; no article is Nigerian).
newspaper
get_newspaper_stats
Per-newspaper article counts and date ranges.
periodicals
list_periodicals
List the Islamic periodical/series titles in the publications subset, with issue counts and year ranges. Use the returned newspaper value as the `newspaper` filter on search_publications.
persons
list_persons
List personnes from the IWAC index, sorted by frequency (most-referenced first). The optional 'country' filter selects entries that APPEAR IN records from that country (mentioned-in, not located-in), ranked by collection-wide 'frequency' — so foreign and cross-border entries can appear. Nigeria reaches only the few entries its references mention (index frequency counts articles, publications and references; no article is Nigerian).
place
get_place_distribution
Place tags joined to authority coordinates. Separates publication countries from mentioned places; missing geocodes are counted explicitly.
publication
get_publication_fulltext
Full OCR text of a publication in 25k-char parts (follow `next_offset`), or ~2000-char excerpts around keyword matches (accent-insensitive; capped: see match_count vs excerpts_returned).
publications
search_publications
Search Islamic publications (periodical issues, books). `keyword` matches title, subject, table of contents, and full OCR text (TOC hits come back as matching_toc_entries); use French concept keywords regardless of the user's report language. Filter by newspaper/series, subject, country and year. Use list_periodicals to discover series titles, and get_publication_fulltext for keyword excerpts from a single issue.
reference
get_reference
Full bibliographic record for one academic reference (by id), including the complete abstract (present for ~51% of references), subjects, DOI/URL, and host-work details (book, volume, issue, pages).
references
search_references
Search academic references (journal articles, book chapters, theses, books, reports) by keyword and metadata. `keyword` requires every word in the title + abstract ("quote" a phrase). References are multilingual: try French and English title/abstract keywords when relevant; metadata/filter values such as `reference_type` and `language` use French labels. Results include a short abstract snippet — use get_reference for the full abstract and bibliographic detail.
search
search
Search the Islam West Africa Collection across newspaper articles, Islamic publications, archival documents, academic references, audiovisual recordings, photographs, and the authority index (persons/places/organisations/events/subjects). Pass ONE concept or name — e.g. 'Tijaniyya', 'laïcité', 'Sheikh Gumi', 'pèlerinage'. Matching is accent- and case-insensitive; a multi-word query requires every word to appear somewhere in the item, so prefer a single concept per call. Write query strings and concept keywords in French for press/publication/document/index discovery even when the user's report language is not French. Academic references are multilingual, so try French and English title/abstract terms when relevant; metadata/filter labels remain French. Use the French transliteration of Islamic terms (Tabaski not 'Eid al-Adha', charia not 'sharia', Maouloud not 'Mawlid'). Returns {results:[{id,title,url,category}], ranking}; each result's `category` names its subset and the `ranking` field documents the ordering. Pass an id to `fetch` to read the full text. For filtered queries (by country, date, or newspaper) use the search_* tools instead.
similar
get_similar_items
Nearest stored embeddings by cosine similarity. Articles and documents lead with the dataset's published top 10. Scores run high (unrelated ~0.7) and rank reading candidates; >= 0.97 suggests a near-duplicate, but no threshold proves a reprint. Returns source IDs and dates. Corpus-wide candidate generation belongs offline.
subjects
list_subjects
List sujets from the IWAC index, sorted by frequency (most-referenced first).
temporal
get_temporal_distribution
Counts by Gregorian or Hijri year/month, or pooled lunar month. Group by country/newspaper. Partial dates and missing lunar dates are disclosed. normalize_by returns numerator counts and per-bucket denominators in the same country/outlet/date scope, removing thematic filters. Shares describe IWAC holdings.
topic
get_topic_distribution
Counts of offline LDA topic assignments, optionally over time. Topic labels are interpretive model outputs; exact topic_id filters select assignments rather than keyword matches. Reports unclassified coverage.

Endpoints

URLTransportStateLatencyChecked
https://islam.zmo.de/mcp/ streamable-http answering 394 ms 13 min ago

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Islam West Africa Collection (IWAC) — questions

Answers built from our own checks of this server.

What can Islam West Africa Collection (IWAC) do?
It exposes 39 tools, read directly from the server on our last check. Among them: explore_corpus, fetch, get_article, get_audiovisual, get_collection_stats, get_cooccurrence and 33 more. The full list with descriptions is on this page — we take it from the server itself via tools/list, not from a README. How MCP servers expose tools in the first place →
What is Islam West Africa Collection (IWAC) mostly used for?
Its tools cluster around semantic, audiovisual and sentiment. That is what this server is built to work with — the grouping comes from the actual tool names, not from a category we assigned.
Is Islam West Africa Collection (IWAC) working right now?
We send a real MCP handshake every 15 minutes. Over the last 24 hours 91 of 91 checks got a reply (100.0%), average response time 263 ms. The bar chart above shows every period we have measured.
How do I connect Islam West Africa Collection (IWAC)?
Copy the ready config from this page. We generate it for Claude Code, Claude Desktop, Codex, Cursor and VS Code, each in the form that client actually reads. It is a remote server, so there is nothing to install — the client connects to the address.
Does Islam West Africa Collection (IWAC) need an API key?
No. Islam West Africa Collection (IWAC) completed a full MCP handshake with us as an anonymous client and listed its tools without asking for anything. All 39 of them are readable on this page. This is what we observed, not what the docs claim.
How fast is Islam West Africa Collection (IWAC)?
It answers our handshake in 263 ms on average, which is faster than 52% of all working MCP servers we measure. The comparison comes from our own checks across the whole registry, every 15 minutes.
Is Islam West Africa Collection (IWAC) open source?
The code is open source: it is published under the MIT licence, written in TypeScript, 2 stars on GitHub and 5 open issues. The licence covers the code in the repository, not the hosted service at islam.zmo.de, which runs on its operator's own terms.