Software Developers Thursday

Model Context Protocol: Connecting Local Language Models with Open Data
Lukas Mayr, RWTH Aachen

Running your own LLMs and making them talk to real-world data? That’s exactly what we’ll explore in our August edition of Software Developers Thursday.

Lukas Mayr from RWTH Aachen will walk us through a full integration workflow using the Model Context Protocol (MCP) – a framework for connecting large language models with external tools and APIs. In this hands-on session, you’ll first learn how to set up and run open-source LLMs locally using Ollama. Then we’ll build an MCP-compatible host to bridge the gap between these models and structured data.

In the second part, we’ll implement a custom MCP server that connects to the Open Data Hub APIs, retrieve data, and test everything in a live setup – both with our local host and a commercial one, just to prove the protocol’s flexibility.

See how open-source models become powerful tools when connected to the right data – live and in action!