Guided research starters

Overview

Some MCP clients can show Atlas-guided research starters as selectable commands. They help you begin with a clear civic research shape while keeping Atlas sources, trust signals, and coverage limits attached to the answer. Research starters do not create or modify Atlas data. They guide your assistant through read-only Atlas capabilities such as search, source inspection, place context, coverage analysis, and existing research-run lookup. Compatible clients may let Atlas ask for missing details before the starter runs. For example, Atlas can ask for a missing place, search query, actor, or research-run ID. When the client has candidate actors or completed runs, Atlas can show titled choices instead of asking you to paste an ID.

Starting points

Starting point	What it helps with	What Atlas needs	Optional focus
Research a place	Build a source-linked civic landscape for a place.	Place	Issue focus
Find civic actors	Find people, organizations, initiatives, campaigns, or events for a topic.	Search topic	Place, issue focus
Inspect a source trail	Verify what Atlas knows about one civic actor and where it came from.	Actor	Place
Assess coverage gaps	Explain strong and weak Atlas coverage for a place or issue focus.	Place	Issue focus
Create a research brief	Create a source-linked brief from an existing Atlas research run.	Research run	-

How to use them

Open your MCP client’s prompt or slash-command picker, choose an Atlas starter, and fill in the requested details. For example:

Starter: Research a place
place: Kansas City, MO
issue_focus: housing and labor

The assistant can then ask Atlas for place context, matching actors, source inspection, and coverage gaps. Good answers should show where claims came from and distinguish weak Atlas coverage from evidence that civic work does not exist.

Access

Guided research starters follow the same requirements as Atlas MCP read access:

discovery:read OAuth scope
api.mcp workspace package capability
An active workspace selected during consent

They do not start new research runs in this version, so they do not require discovery:write or long-running task support.

Follow-up questions

Follow-up questions for guided starters are read-only. If you decline or cancel a required detail, Atlas returns the normal missing-detail error. If you decline optional context, Atlas keeps the starter usable with the information already provided. See Confirmations and follow-up questions for how Atlas handles clarification, decline, cancel, and unsupported clients.

MCP overview

Connect an assistant to Atlas.

Atlas capabilities reference

Review what your assistant can ask Atlas to do.

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Tutorials

Open source

Guided research starters

Overview

Starting points

How to use them

Access

Follow-up questions

MCP overview

Atlas capabilities reference

​Overview

​Starting points

​How to use them

​Access

​Follow-up questions

​Related

MCP overview

Atlas capabilities reference

Overview

Starting points

How to use them

Access

Follow-up questions

Related