When to use which portal
DRAFT. First pass, 2026-07-06. Coverage descriptions below are accurate as of this writing but not exhaustively verified against live catalogs — treat as a starting map, not a final index.
New York State and New York City each run their own general-purpose open data catalog, and NYC additionally has several purpose-built government data sources that a general catalog search won’t surface well. This guide is a decision map: given a question, which source actually has the answer.
The two general catalogs
| Portal | Domain | Platform | What it covers |
|---|---|---|---|
| NYC Open Data | data.cityofnewyork.us |
Socrata | The City of New York’s full dataset catalog — thousands of datasets spanning parks, business licenses, demographics, permits, transportation, health, education, and more. The broadest net for “does the city publish data on X.” |
| NYS Open Data | data.ny.gov |
Socrata | New York State’s dataset catalog — state agency data: transportation, health, education, environment, economic development, and state government operations. |
Both are reachable through the same socrata-mcp-server tools (search, get_data, fetch) — just point domain at the portal you need. See mcp-configs/socrata-nyc-nys.mcp.json for pre-wired aliases, and query-patterns.md for the actual query syntax.
Use a general catalog when: you don’t know if a specific purpose-built tool exists for your question, you need to browse/discover datasets by keyword or category, or the data you need doesn’t fit any of the specialized sources below.
NYC’s purpose-built sources (BetaNYC MCPs)
These cover NYC domains that a keyword search in the general catalog handles poorly — legislative process, procurement, government spending, service requests, and legal text are structured very differently from a typical open dataset.
| Source | MCP | What it covers | Why not just search the catalog |
|---|---|---|---|
| NYC Council (Legistar) | nyc-council-mcp |
Bills, hearings, votes, committees, council members | Legislative data is relational (a bill has sponsors, committee history, vote records) — the catalog has flat tables, not this structure. |
| NYC City Record | nyc-record-mcp |
Procurement notices — solicitations, contract awards, public hearings | Procurement notices are published as a daily record, not a queryable dataset. |
| NYC Checkbook | nyc-checkbook-mcp |
Spending, contracts, budget, payroll, revenue (via NYC Comptroller’s API) | The Comptroller’s Checkbook API has its own schema and update cadence, separate from the Open Data catalog. |
| NYC 311 | nyc-311-mcp |
Service-request lookup, city-services calendar, emergency/weather alerts | 311’s live API answers “what’s the status of this specific request” — the catalog’s 311 dataset is a bulk historical export, not a live lookup. |
| NYC Charter, Administrative Code, Rules | nyc-charter-laws-rules |
Full legal text (offline corpus) | This is legal text, not tabular data — full-text search across chapters and sections, not a dataset schema. |
NYS’s purpose-built source
| Source | MCP | What it covers | Why not just search the catalog |
|---|---|---|---|
| NYS Open Legislation | nys-openlegislation-mcp |
Bills, laws, members, committees, calendars, agendas, floor/hearing transcripts (150k+ records) | Same shape as NYC Council — legislative process data is relational, not a flat dataset. |
Decision guide
- Is the question about a specific legal/legislative/procurement/spending/service-request process? → Use the matching purpose-built MCP above.
- Is the question “does the city/state publish data on X” or “find me a dataset about Y”? → Search the general Socrata catalog (NYC or NYS, per the question’s jurisdiction).
- Not sure which government level has it? → Search both catalogs; NYC and NYS often publish overlapping-but-different data (e.g., both publish some environmental and health data, at different granularity).
- Looking for county or municipal data outside NYC? → See
resources/ny-open-data-portals.md— most NY counties and cities run their own separate portal, not part of either catalog above.
A note on trust
Every source table above traces back to an authoritative government system — Legistar, the Comptroller’s Checkbook, the 311 system, the Charter itself, or the Socrata-hosted catalogs. That traceability is the point of this whole repo: an AI agent citing “NYC Checkbook, contract #12345” is verifiable; an agent guessing from training data is not. See grounding-ai-agents.md for why this matters and how to build for it.