The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) launched a new database providing free access to a wealth of multilingual scientific and technical terminology on September 19, 2014.

Through its web-based interface, WIPO Pearl promotes accurate and consistent use of terms across different languages, and makes it easier to search and share scientific and technical knowledge.

The database initially includes terms found in applications filed via WIPO’s Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) and will eventually include collections from other areas of WIPO, such as trademarks, industrial designs, and terminology found in other treaties administered by WIPO.

The 90,000+ terms and 15,000 concepts in 10 languages have all been entered and validated by WIPO-PCT language experts and terminologists, who have experience working with technical documents in multiple languages. Regular additions to the data are planned.

WIPO Pearl offers powerful search features, including the ability to select source and target languages, search by subject field as well as with abbreviations, and “fuzzy,” “exact” and Boolean search functions.

Users can obtain a quick list of results, which can be expanded, while browsing via “concept maps” that show linkages among related concepts by language and subject field - for example, showing concepts that are broader or narrower in scope than other concepts.

Key features:

• 10 languages: Arabic, Chinese, English, French, German, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish
• Classification of concepts by 29 subject fields
• Fully validated content with reliability scores
• “Concept maps” that give an innovative graphical display of related concepts by language and subject field
• Context provided for all terms
• Term labelling (e.g. “recommended”, “standardized” or “avoid”)
• Integrated with PATENTSCOPE and CLIR (Cross-Lingual Information Retrieval)
• Users can rate the quality of results
  

WIPO Pearl can be accessed from the Reference page, along with WIPO’s PATENTSCOPE technology database - which now contains nearly 40 million patent records – and WIPO’s other searchable data collections.