Amtsblatt MCP

🇨🇭 Part of the [Swiss Public Data MCP Portfolio](https://github.com/malkreide)

📰 amtsblatt-mcp

MCP server for amtsblattportal.ch — the Swiss official gazette portal

(SHAB + 27 cantonal gazettes). Public procurement and official notices,

person-data rubrics excluded by design.

🇩🇪 Deutsche Version

Overview

The Amtsblattportal publishes roughly 2.79 million official notices: public procurement, cantonal and communal announcements, enactments, spatial planning — and also bankruptcies, debt collection, inheritance calls and civil-status records naming natural persons.

This server exposes only the first group. Rubrics carrying systematic natural-person data are not queryable, and no tool accepts a person's name, birth date or address. That is a deliberate data-protection decision, explained in Data Protection & Scope.

Anchor demo query: *"Which public tenders did canton Ticino publish this month?"*

Demo

→ gazette_search_procurement(canton="TI", only_language=True, language="it") → gazette_get_publication(id=…)

For procurement in any other canton — including Zürich, Bern and Basel-Stadt — use swiss-procurement-mcp; see Boundary with swiss-procurement-mcp.

Features

• Fail-closed green allow-list — 49 released rubrics out of 152; everything else is blocked by default, including rubrics the upstream adds later
• Explanatory refusals — a blocked rubric returns *why*, never a silent empty result and never a workaround hint
• Procurement-aware — knows that only AR and TI still publish tenders here, that BS wound down during 2024 and BL/VS are historical archives, that OB-ZG was never filled after the simap switch, and that ZH routes everything through simap.ch — so it explains instead of returning nothing. Activity is measured, not read off the rubric label
• Deadline arithmetic in Europe/Zurich, the legally relevant timezone
• Honest multilingual counts — the portal publishes one record per language with a *different* publication number each; identical editions are collapsed, translated ones are reported via language_mix rather than guessed at, and only_language=True gives a single-language view
• Defensive XML parsing — the schema is per-sub-rubric; no rubric-specific path is hard-coded, and entity-escaped HTML bodies are unescaped and stripped
• Egress allow-list, retry with backoff, structured JSON logging
• Markdown or JSON output with per-response attribution + provenance

Prerequisites

• Python 3.11+
• No API key. The read API of amtsblattportal.ch is freely accessible.

Installation

pip install amtsblatt-mcp

or, without installing:

uvx amtsblatt-mcp

From source:

git clone https://github.com/malkreide/amtsblatt-mcp

cd amtsblatt-mcp pip install -e ".[dev]"

Configuration

Claude Desktop

{

"mcpServers": { "amtsblatt": { "command": "uvx", "args": ["amtsblatt-mcp"] } } }

Cloud deployment (streamable-http)

export MCP_TRANSPORT=streamable-http

export MCP_API_KEY="$(openssl rand -hex 32)" # mandatory — fails loud if unset export PORT=8000 amtsblatt-mcp

The endpoint is `/mcp`.

Migrating from SSE. Until 0.18.0 this server spoke SSE only, on

/sse + /messages. MCP spec 2026-07-28 reclassifies HTTP+SSE as

deprecated with a twelve-month removal window and removes protocol-level

sessions, so streamable-http is now the default. MCP_TRANSPORT=sse still

works and still carries the full bearer-auth, rate-limit and CORS stack — it

logs a warning at startup naming the deadline. **Update the client URL when

you switch**: the path change is the part that breaks silently.

Logging

Built on structlog. Every event emitted during a tool call carries that call's correlation_id, bound via contextvars — so a retry or an egress denial logged deep in the HTTP path can be joined to the request that caused it, without threading context through every signature.

Records carry the exception *type* only — never its message and never an upstream response body.

{"event":"tool_call_started","tool":"gazette_search_procurement","correlation_id":"23221af26ae640c7","level":"debug","timestamp":"2026-07-27T22:20:07.494276Z"}

{"status":"ok","latency_ms":312,"event":"tool_call","tool":"gazette_search_procurement","correlation_id":"23221af26ae640c7","level":"info","timestamp":"2026-07-27T22:20:07.806Z"}

Ship these to your SIEM and alert on auth_failed, rate_limited, egress_denied, green_gate_violation and blocked_publication_requested — the last two mean something tried to reach a rubric this server does not serve.

Available Tools

All tools are readOnlyHint=True.

Example use cases

Data Protection & Scope

The Amtsblattportal systematically publishes personal data of natural persons. Those publications are public — but making them *systematically queryable by name* through an AI agent is a repurposing the publication never intended, and a profiling instrument under the revised Swiss FADP (revDSG).

Four rules follow, and they are enforced in code, not in documentation:

1. Allow-list, never block-list. Not explicitly green ⇒ not queryable. New upstream rubrics are closed by default.
2. No person-based search entry in any tool signature.
3. No persistence. Publications have statutory deletion periods; a cache outliving them would actively undermine them. Only the *taxonomy* is cached.
4. Blocked ⇒ explained. Never a silent empty result, never a hint at circumvention.

What is excluded

🔴 Konkurse (KK), Schuldbetreibungen (SB), Schuldenrufe (LS, SR), Nachlass (NA), Erbschaft/Testament/Ableben (ES, TE-*, VA-*), Familie & Zivilstand (FZ-*, BV-*, BU-*), gerichtliche Vorladungen (UV, GB-*, GE-*, SJ-BE), Baugesuche (BP-*), Grundbuch (GR-*), Meldungskatalog GR (AA-GR).

🟡 Deferred: Steuerwesen, Anzeigen, Bewilligungen, Bildungs- und Kirchenwesen and the general catch-all rubrics.

The full audit trail — including three documented extensions to the source specification — is in docs/rubric-classification.md.

How much each decision covers is measured, not estimated. docs/coverage-matrix.md enumerates the source's own rubric axis and marks this server's reach into it: 84.2 % of 2 804 063 publications are reachable, 12.6 % blocked by decision, 3.3 % still unclassified. The insolvency group alone is 321 704 publications — present in the source, out of reach here on purpose. Without that figure, "out of scope" and "not in the source" read the same in a review, and this repository made exactly that mistake once (see ARCH-003 in SECURITY.md).

The boundary with register-mcp

For publications about a specific company, use [register-mcp](https://github.com/malkreide/re