Cartographer MCP Server

If you already use Cartographer, the cartographer mcp server is the piece that lets your assistant work with it directly. Governance MCP server for agent-maintained knowledge bases (OKF): git-backed writes, search, lint.

What the server does

LLM agents forget everything between sessions, and stateless RAG only bolts retrieval onto that amnesia. The alternative is a knowledge base the agent itself builds and maintains over time — but letting an agent loose on a folder of files ends in broken links, lost history, and silent corruption. Cartographer is the governance layer that makes the pattern safe: the agent works the wiki exclusively through MCP tools, and the server enforces every invariant — validation, linking, immutability gates, one git commit per write.

The wiki is grounded in Karpathy's "LLM Wiki" pattern (operating model: knowledge accretes over time, it is not stateless RAG) on top of the OKF substrate (Open Knowledge Format v0.1 by Google Cloud) — each KB is a folder of .md files with YAML frontmatter, self-contained and version-controlled with git. Zero lock-in: the wiki is readable by any tool, including Obsidian and any text editor.

• 🔧 Full MCP tool suite — complete list in docs/control-plane.md
• 📖 Read & navigation — atlas_overview, index_get, concept_read, map_list,
• 🔍 Search — keyword (pure-Go inverted index) plus optional hybrid semantic search via Ollama
• ✍️ Validated writes with optimistic concurrency (if_match / content-hash), including concept_new from KB-owned templates discovered through template_list
• 📎 Concept assets — read, write, list, and delete binary or text dossier files inside expanded concepts
• 🛡️ Governance — deterministic lint (broken link, stale claim, orphan, map contracts), commit_gate,

Installation

Setup follows the usual MCP pattern — install or clone the server, register it in your client's configuration file, restart the client.

Available tools

The toolset is worth reading before you wire it up, because it tells you what the integration is really for:

• Server — multi-KB, HTTP + token auth, optional semantic embeddings. For shared and remote
• CARTOGRAPHER_KB — —
• CARTOGRAPHER_DATA — —
• CARTOGRAPHER_HTTP — —
• CARTOGRAPHER_AUTH — auto
• CARTOGRAPHER_TOKENS — —
• CARTOGRAPHER_GIT_AUTOCOMMIT — true
• CARTOGRAPHER_GIT_SYNC — true
• CARTOGRAPHER_OLLAMA — —
• CARTOGRAPHER_OLLAMA_MODEL — nomic-embed-text
• CARTOGRAPHER_AUDIT_LOG — —
• CARTOGRAPHER_AUDIT_KEY — —

Credentials and setup notes

Configuration is passed through the environment: CARTOGRAPHER_AUDIT_KEY. Treat anything key-shaped as a real credential — scope it to the minimum the server needs, and rotate it if it ever lands in a shared config.

Worth knowing first

• It runs with your machine's permissions. That is convenient and also the reason to think about what you point it at before you approve a tool call.
• With 12 tools registered it takes up a noticeable share of the context window; turn it off in projects that never touch Cartographer.
• Missing credentials fail quietly in some clients — if no tools show up, check the environment block first.
• Keep per-call confirmation enabled while you learn its behaviour; it is the cheapest safeguard you have.

Where it fits

Plenty of developer tooling servers cover similar ground. The differences that matter in practice are scope of access and how much setup stands between you and a working tool call. Cartographer's toolset — Server, CARTOGRAPHER_KB, CARTOGRAPHER_DATA and 9 more — is a fair guide to whether it matches your workflow. It is maintained by BeppeTemp; worth a glance at recent repository activity before you build anything load-bearing on it.

We check each listing at SyncDev against the project's documentation before it goes live — if something here drifts out of date, it is a bug worth reporting.