# Islam West Africa Collection (IWAC) MCP server

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

## Links
- Registry page: https://www.getdrio.com/mcp/io-github-fmadore-iwac-mcp-server
- Repository: https://github.com/fmadore/iwac-mcp-server
- Website: https://islam.zmo.de/s/westafrica/

## Install
- Endpoint: https://islam.zmo.de/mcp/
- Auth: Not captured

## Setup notes
- Package: Mcpb https://github.com/fmadore/iwac-mcp-server/releases/download/v1.4.1/iwac-mcp-server-windows.mcpb
- Package: Mcpb https://github.com/fmadore/iwac-mcp-server/releases/download/v1.4.1/iwac-mcp-server-macos.mcpb
- Remote endpoint: https://islam.zmo.de/mcp/

## Tools
- search (Search IWAC) - 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. Endpoint: https://islam.zmo.de/mcp/
- fetch (Fetch IWAC item) - 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. Endpoint: https://islam.zmo.de/mcp/
- search_articles (Search newspaper articles) - Search IWAC newspaper articles by keyword (title + OCR + AI abstract), country, newspaper, subject, and date range. Use French concept keywords regardless of the user's report language. Matching is accent- and case-insensitive. Endpoint: https://islam.zmo.de/mcp/
- get_article (Get article details) - Get one article (by id): full metadata, the AI abstract (description_ai), AI sentiment, and OCR text. Pass a `keyword` to get ~2000-char excerpts around each match instead of the full (capped) OCR. Endpoint: https://islam.zmo.de/mcp/
- search_by_sentiment (Filter articles by AI sentiment) - Filter articles by gemini-3-flash-preview sentiment labels (accent/case-insensitive exact match). One model's reading, not a consensus — two other models scored the same articles and often disagree; get_sentiment_distribution with model:"all" shows by how much. Endpoint: https://islam.zmo.de/mcp/
- get_sentiment_distribution (Aggregate AI sentiment) - Aggregate AI polarity, centrality and subjectivity across a filter set. Three models scored the corpus independently — gemini-3-flash-preview, gpt-5-mini, ministral-14b-2512 — so model:"all" returns each one's distribution plus how often they AGREE. Treat disagreement as a fact about the judgement rather than noise: in a set where the three models split on polarity, no single model's number should be quoted alone. Articles were scored whether or not their full text ships, so these shares are not subject to the OCR coverage limit; compare scored_by_all against total_articles for the residual gap. Endpoint: https://islam.zmo.de/mcp/
- search_index (Search authority index) - Search the IWAC authority index (persons, places, organisations, events, subjects) by name. Accent/case-insensitive. Endpoint: https://islam.zmo.de/mcp/
- get_index_entry (Get index entry details) - Get full details of an index entry by id (raw dataset columns, French names — Titre, Prénom, Coordonnées…). Endpoint: https://islam.zmo.de/mcp/
- list_subjects (List sujets from the index) - List sujets from the IWAC index, sorted by frequency (most-referenced first). Endpoint: https://islam.zmo.de/mcp/
- list_locations (List lieux from the index) - 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 returns none here (index frequency is computed from articles + publications + references, which have no Nigerian items — Nigeria is audiovisual only). Endpoint: https://islam.zmo.de/mcp/
- list_persons (List personnes from the index) - 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 returns none here (index frequency is computed from articles + publications + references, which have no Nigerian items — Nigeria is audiovisual only). Endpoint: https://islam.zmo.de/mcp/
- get_collection_stats (Collection statistics) - Overall statistics for every IWAC subset, including `fulltext_coverage` — how many items in each subset actually carry searchable full text in this public dataset. Read that before treating any keyword count as a full-text census. Endpoint: https://islam.zmo.de/mcp/
- get_newspaper_stats (Newspaper statistics) - Per-newspaper article counts and date ranges. Endpoint: https://islam.zmo.de/mcp/
- get_country_comparison (Compare countries) - Compare article counts, newspaper counts, date ranges, and gemini-3-flash-preview polarity across countries. Endpoint: https://islam.zmo.de/mcp/
- get_temporal_distribution (Coverage over time) - Counts of matching items per year (or month) — the direct way to chart coverage trends over time instead of paging through search results. Defaults to articles; also works on publications, references, documents, audiovisual, and images. Accepts the same filters as the corresponding search_* tool (keyword = ONE substring over the subset's text fields, country, newspaper/series, subject, date range). Optional group_by=country|newspaper returns one distribution per group. Items dated only to a year keep a bare-year key even at month granularity; undated items are counted in undated_count, never dropped silently. Set calendar=hijri to bucket by the Islamic (Umm al-Qura) calendar instead — with granularity=lunar_month this collapses every year into the twelve lunar months, which is the ONLY way to see observance-driven coverage (Ramadan, Dhu al-Hijja/hajj, Shawwal/Korité): the lunar year drifts ~11 days against the Gregorian, so a Gregorian axis smears each observance across all twelve months. Hijri buckets need a full YYYY-MM-DD, so items dated only to a year or month are reported in imprecise_date_count. Endpoint: https://islam.zmo.de/mcp/
- get_topic_distribution (Topic distribution) - How a filtered set distributes across the precomputed LDA topics, each labelled by its top terms (articles carry 30 topics and are ~99.5% classified; references have their own 33-topic model and only ~46% carry an assignment, so read its `classified` against `total_matches`). Topics are assigned offline over the full text, so they describe what a piece is ABOUT rather than which words it contains — use this instead of keyword counting to map a corpus. Optional over_time returns per-year counts for the leading topics. min_prob keeps only articles where the topic is at least that dominant (mean assignment probability is 0.34, so 0.5 is already a strong filter). Endpoint: https://islam.zmo.de/mcp/
- get_field_distribution (Rank a field's values) - Rank the values of one multi-valued field across a filtered set — the direct way to answer 'which places does this coverage name most', 'who signs these articles', 'what subjects dominate'. Pipe-joined fields (subject, spatial, author, language, country) are split, so an article tagged 'Prière|Ramadan' counts once for each. Optional over_time adds the per-year share of items that carry ANY value for the field, which is how you see e.g. bylines appearing as the press professionalises. Endpoint: https://islam.zmo.de/mcp/
- get_cooccurrence (Co-occurrence matrix) - How often the top values of a multi-valued field appear on the SAME item — a subject/place co-mention matrix. Answers 'what is X discussed alongside' without reading anything: the pair counts are the structure of the tagging. Returns the top values, the full symmetric matrix (diagonal = each value's own count) and the strongest pairs. Endpoint: https://islam.zmo.de/mcp/
- get_place_distribution (Places on a map) - Places named by a filtered set of items, joined to the index's authority records so each carries coordinates where the index has them. Use this rather than get_field_distribution when the question is geographic — where coverage clusters — and the plain ranking when it is not. Only `Lieux` index entries are geocoded (555 of 683); persons, organisations and events carry no coordinates and never will, and any named place with no index entry comes back under `ungeocoded` rather than being dropped. Endpoint: https://islam.zmo.de/mcp/
- get_semantic_map (Semantic scatter) - A 2-D scatter of a filtered set, projected from the stored 768-dimension embeddings by PCA. Shows which items sit near each other in meaning — where a set splits into distinct strands and where it is one cloud. Read `explained_variance` before drawing any conclusion: with 768 dimensions the first two components usually carry a modest share, and a scatter explaining 6% of the variance is a much weaker claim than one explaining 40%. This is PCA, not UMAP: it spreads the broadest axes of variation and flattens fine cluster structure, so it is not comparable to the semantic landscapes on islam.zmo.de. Needs no API key — the vectors are a column in the dataset — but only items whose full text ships are embedded at all. NOTE the payload scales with `limit`: a point cloud is a chart, not something a text-only client can read, so for those the useful part is the explained-variance summary rather than the coordinates. Keep `limit` low unless a chart is going to be drawn. Endpoint: https://islam.zmo.de/mcp/
- get_similar_items (Find similar items) - The items nearest to a given one in meaning, by cosine similarity over the stored embeddings. Answers 'what else is like this' without a keyword — it finds pieces on the same event or theme that share no vocabulary. A neighbour above ~0.85 is usually the same story reprinted or lightly rewritten, which is how to spot syndication in this corpus; 0.6-0.8 is 'same subject, different piece'. Needs no API key: the item's own vector is a column, so nothing has to be embedded at request time. This is per-item, NOT the corpus-wide near-duplicate sweep — that is an all-pairs job and belongs offline. Endpoint: https://islam.zmo.de/mcp/
- get_lexical_metrics (Press language metrics) - Readability, lexical richness and length of the press text, averaged by year, newspaper or country. `Lisibilite_OCR` is a French readability score (higher = easier); `Richesse_Lexicale_OCR` is MATTR, a moving-average type-token ratio that is ALREADY length-robust — do not normalise it by word count or bin it by length. Readability is computed against a French lexicon, so non-French items are excluded from that metric (and counted in readability_excluded) rather than reported as unreadable; MATTR and word count need no lexicon and cover everything. Only items whose full text ships in this public dataset carry these columns at all. Endpoint: https://islam.zmo.de/mcp/
- search_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. Endpoint: https://islam.zmo.de/mcp/
- list_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. Endpoint: https://islam.zmo.de/mcp/
- get_publication_fulltext (Get publication full text) - Full OCR text of a publication, optionally returning ~2000-char excerpts around keyword matches (accent-insensitive; capped — see match_count vs excerpts_returned). Endpoint: https://islam.zmo.de/mcp/
- search_references (Search academic references) - Search academic references (journal articles, book chapters, theses, books, reports) by keyword and metadata. `keyword` is a single substring match over title + abstract, so search ONE term per call (combined terms like 'pèlerinage Mecque' miss results). 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. Endpoint: https://islam.zmo.de/mcp/
- get_reference (Get reference details) - 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). Endpoint: https://islam.zmo.de/mcp/
- search_documents (Search archival 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. Endpoint: https://islam.zmo.de/mcp/
- get_document (Get document details) - Get one archival document (by id): full metadata, AI description, and OCR text. Pass a `keyword` to get ~2000-char excerpts around each match instead of the full (capped) OCR — useful for long documents. Endpoint: https://islam.zmo.de/mcp/
- search_audiovisual (Search audiovisual materials) - Search audiovisual materials by keyword and metadata. Keyword matches title, creator, publisher, subject, spatial, language, source, and AI description where present. Endpoint: https://islam.zmo.de/mcp/
- list_audiovisual (List audiovisual materials) - List audiovisual materials (Nigerian recordings, incl. Hausa/Arabic content). Endpoint: https://islam.zmo.de/mcp/
- get_audiovisual (Get audiovisual details) - Get one audiovisual record by id, including creator/publisher, media URL, duration, medium, subjects, places, language, source, and IWAC URL. Endpoint: https://islam.zmo.de/mcp/
- search_images (Search photographs) - 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. Endpoint: https://islam.zmo.de/mcp/
- get_image (Get photograph details) - 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. Endpoint: https://islam.zmo.de/mcp/

## Resources
- ui://iwac/charts.html - IWAC charts Interactive charts for the IWAC statistics tools: coverage over time, periodical runs, country and newspaper comparisons, sentiment breakdowns and collection composition. MIME type: text/html;profile=mcp-app

## Prompts
- iwac_research - IWAC research workflow Run a structured, source-cited investigation of the IWAC archive at a chosen depth (brief or extended), following the five-phase method: scope, search, read, triangulate, synthesise. Arguments: question, depth
- iwac_overview - What is in the IWAC collection? A plain-language tour of what the Islam West Africa Collection holds and the kinds of questions it can answer — no research run, no tool enumeration.

## Metadata
- Owner: io.github.fmadore
- Version: 1.4.1
- Runtime: Mcpb
- Transports: STDIO, HTTP
- License: Not captured
- Language: Not captured
- Stars: Not captured
- Updated: Aug 1, 2026
- Source: https://registry.modelcontextprotocol.io