Discovery and Retrieval

Choosing the right surface

Use list_economic_concepts and get_economic_series for ordinary analyst requests. This route is the safest LLM-facing path because the server controls the mapping from economic concepts to audited source datasets and series.

Use source-native tools when you know the ABS dataflow, SDMX key, RBA table, or RBA series IDs you want:

• search_datasets ranks matching curated ABS and RBA entries.
• list_catalogue lists entries unranked and supports source, category, and tag filters.
• get_abs_dataset_structure retrieves ABS SDMX dimensions and code lists.
• get_abs_data retrieves ABS data in the normalised response shape.
• get_rba_table retrieves RBA statistical tables in the normalised response shape.

list_rba_tables remains available as a deprecated compatibility alias. New integrations should use list_catalogue(source="rba").

Date bounds

get_economic_series accepts analyst-friendly bounds:

• YYYY
• YYYY-QN
• YYYY-SN
• YYYY-MM
• YYYY-MM-DD

The server normalises these to ABS periods or RBA ISO dates after resolving the concept.

Raw ABS and RBA tools keep source-native conventions:

• ABS retrieval uses start_period and end_period.
• RBA retrieval uses start_date and end_date.

Validation behaviour

• Empty identifiers and empty search queries are rejected before any network call.
• last_n must be positive when provided.
• ABS period strings are validated for annual, half-yearly, quarterly, and monthly formats.
• RBA date bounds are validated as ISO dates.
• Unknown semantic concepts and unsupported variants raise explicit validation errors.

Search scores are ranking metadata, not a stable public contract.