WIPO Pearl facilitates search and use of scientific and technical information

The WIPO Pearl database, created back in 2014 by experienced linguists and terminologists of the World Intellectual Property Organization, promotes accurate and consistent use of scientific and technical terms in various languages.

The database currently contains over 190,000 terms. The database interface is available in 10 languages, as well as in a mobile-friendly form.

Scientific and technical terms can be searched in 45 different language combinations, offering the possibility to search between European and Asian languages, as well as between any of these languages and Arabic. This makes WIPO Pearl unique amongst the current offering of language resources available freely on the Web.

Also unique to WIPO Pearl are Concept Maps, which allow the user to browse domain knowledge by exploring links between concepts.

In addition to providing human-built Concept Maps, WIPO Pearl leverages artificial intelligence (AI) to generate so-called Concept Clouds – suggested new clusters of relations between concepts. WIPO Pearl is the first terminology database to feature such an innovation.

An ever-growing network of partners worldwide, including universities and government bodies, now helps to populate WIPO Pearl with new terms, whilst subject field experts in the partner institutions check the accuracy of terms in their field of specialization and raise the term reliability score.

The WIPO Pearl terminology database has added some 1,500 new COVID-19-related terms, helping innovators targeting new coronavirus treatments and diagnostics with a baseline set of terms and their multilingual equivalents. This advancement will foster international collaboration and promote easier access to information in patent documents and other public resources produced around the world.

Based on the WIPO materials.