Skip to main content

COMPEL Glossary / model-context-protocol-mcp

Model Context Protocol (MCP)

An open protocol published by Anthropic in November 2024 for interoperability between models and tools — standardising how servers expose tools, resources, and prompts to AI clients.

What this means in practice

MCP is becoming the reference A2A-style interoperability layer; governance concerns include auth, audit, and tool-source provenance.

Synonyms

MCP , Anthropic Model Context Protocol

See also

  • Tool registry — An authoritative inventory of tools — with schemas, permissions, owners, deprecation state, and audit log — that an agent may call.
  • Tool schema — The JSON-schema (or equivalent structured) definition of a tool's parameters, types, and constraints.
  • Agent-to-agent (A2A) protocol — The communication mechanism between AI agents — specifying message format, authentication, authorization scope, rate limiting, and audit logging.
  • Tool use / function calling — A prompt pattern authorizing the model to request named functions with structured arguments — searching the web, reading a database, calling a calculator, triggering an API — rather than generating all answers from its weights.