When the majority of the world population is struggling to cope with COVID -19 challenges and the Scientists and researchers are working around the clock to find a cure of this deadly virus; WIPO in its recent effort has added some 1500 new COVID-19 related terms in 10 languages in its Pearl terminology Database to help on the new coronavirus treatments and diagnostics.
WIPO in its latest press release on September 22, 2020, mentioned this improvement is expected to nurture international collaboration and promote easier access to information in patent documents and other public resources produced around the world.
In words of the WIPO Director General Francis Gurry, “Innovation is increasingly global in nature, so a verified multilingual set of commonly understood COVID-19-related terms creates a knowledge base that helps researchers access and build upon work created in another language. WIPO is providing this upgraded service in support of the global drive to find new treatments and vaccines for the coronavirus, which is the quintessential global challenge requiring mutual comprehension and cooperation.”
From September 22. 2020, WIPO’s Pearl database shall contain 147 key concepts related to COVID-19 drawn primarily from fields like biology, medicine (especially epidemiology and diagnostics), and public health. Each of these key concepts is provided in 10 languages viz. Arabic, Chinese, English, French, German, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish, which are also the official languages of WIPO’s International Patent System. This amounts to nearly 1500 terms to provide consistency and clarity across languages.
WIPO’s Pearl database currently contains nearly 200,000 terms on subjects ranging from biopesticides, chatbots and green chemistry to nanosatellites, quantum computing, and virtual reality. The terms are also provided in a separate stand-alone glossary on the WIPO Pearl website.
Pearl is WIPO’s Multilingual Terminology Portal launched back in 2014, which gives access to scientific and technical terms derived from patent documents in order to promote accurate and consistent use of terms across different languages for making it easier to search and share scientific and technical knowledge.
It’s also integrated with PATENTSCOPE so that the user can search the entire PATENTSCOPE corpus for terms and their equivalents in other languages.
The users can also use the information displayed in subsets of Concept Maps – so-called Concept Paths – to conduct combined keyword searches in PATENTSCOPE. The PATENTSCOPE database can also be accessed directly from the hit-list of results obtained by conducting a traditional search by term in the Linguistic Search interface. WIPO Pearl makes use of artificial intelligence (AI) to generate so-called Concept Clouds – suggested new clusters of relations between concepts making it the first terminology database to feature such an innovation. WIPO Pearl is also integrated with WIPO translate.
The COVID-19 glossary on the Pearl database can be accessed from here. The glossary is divided into topics and, within each topic, concepts are listed according to the relations between them. Links are provided to the Full Record in WIPO Pearl, where definitions, multilingual equivalents, contexts, and concept maps can be found. The glossary is also linked to PATENTSCOPE, allowing any patents containing these terms to be easily located. The COVID-19 terms can also be browsed using WIPO Pearl’s Linguistic Search and Concept Map Search.
For example, a researcher could start with an English term and, by using the validated equivalents for the term in other languages, be able to retrieve relevant patents in up to nine other languages. These COVID-19 terms are available for free download. The user can access them using a .pdf file or a .xml file available here.
