@pipeworx/wipo-pearl

Connect: https://pipeworx.io/mcp — every tool in the catalog, including @pipeworx/wipo-pearl’s. Install: one-click buttons

No MCP client? Skip the connection: POST https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/search_packs {"query":"..."} to find a tool below, GET /v1/tools/<name> for its schema, POST the same URL with arguments for the data — see For AI agents.

Tools: 3

Scientific, technical and IP legal terminology — search a term and get back validated equivalents across 10 languages, each with a reliability rating, defining context, usage note and source. Platform key, with a small keyless fallback.

Tools

• pearl_search_terms(term, source_language?, target_languages?, subject_field?, abbreviation?, exact_search?, limit?) — search for a term; returns matching concept records (concept id, matched term text, subject field).
• pearl_concept(concept_id, lang_code?) — the full database record for one concept id (from pearl_search_terms): equivalents grouped by language, each with a reliability rating, defining context, usage note and source.
• pearl_subject_fields() — reference list of the 29 subject-field codes and 10 language codes the other two tools accept. No arguments.

Auth

Platform key (PLATFORM_WIPO_KEY) with BYO override via _apiKey. Unlike most platform keys, the stored value is a JSON STRING — {"client_id":"...","client_secret":"..."} — not a bare token, because the WIPO Business Partner Portal issues an application as a client_id/secret pair rather than a single key. Each call JSON.parses it and exchanges the pair for a short-lived Bearer JWT via OAuth2 client_credentials; the token is not cached across calls.

Activation is two gates, not one — registering an application is not the same as being able to call the API. The Business Partner Portal (b2b.wipo.int) issues the client_id/client_secret immediately on registration, but the application also has to be subscribed to the “WIPO Pearl API” product/plan, and that subscription is reviewed and approved by WIPO before it’s usable — it is not instant and not guaranteed. A credential that authenticates fine at the OAuth2 token endpoint can still get a 403 from the Pearl API itself if the subscription step hasn’t been approved yet; this pack’s error message says exactly that rather than a generic “forbidden”, so it doesn’t read as our outage. If no credential (platform or BYO) is present at all, calls fall back to WIPO’s own tiny keyless allowance — its own portal describes this as “5 requests per day” before you’re expected to register — which is only useful for a one-off smoke test, never production traffic through a shared gateway.

Data sources

• World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), WIPO Pearl terminology database — 250,000+ validated terms in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, German, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish, across 29 subject fields.

Notes for the next person

• The two tools are NOT equally reachable without a credential. pearl_search_terms’s underlying search route answers keyless requests with real 200s (subject to the “5 requests/day” allowance above). pearl_concept’s underlying detail route answered a flat 500 Internal Server Error on every keyless attempt made while building this pack — it appears to require the OAuth2 credential, and the upstream throws rather than returning a clean 401/403 when it’s missing. Expect this route specifically to look “down” if ever called without a working credential; it isn’t — it’s just gated differently than the sibling route.
• The keyless allowance is per calling IP, not a single global budget — confirmed by exhausting it from one network path (a 429 “Rate limit exceeded! You reached the limit of 5 requests per 1440 minutes”) while an identical call from a different egress still returned 200. Don’t read one exhausted path as the whole API being down.
• The product page is a Gravitee developer-portal SPA with no endpoint in its rendered HTML. The live entrypoint, the OAuth2 token endpoint, the full request/response contract and the subject-field/language tables all came from the portal’s own backend REST API and documentation pages (its assets/config.json, /apis/<id>, /apis/<id>/pages and the portal-wide FAQ pages) — see the file header in src/index.ts for exactly which pages. There is no dedicated subject-fields or languages endpoint; those two tables are from the product’s own “Data Models” documentation page, not an API call, which is why pearl_subject_fields is static rather than a proxy.
• The response shape of an authenticated /records/{id} call is inferred from the product’s OpenAPI spec, not empirically observed — building this pack had no working credential to test with. pearl_concept raises a loud upstream_parse error (naming the URL and body length) rather than a silent empty success if a real response doesn’t match the documented shape, so a mismatch will surface on the first real call instead of sitting unnoticed.
• hits/count in the search response are JSON strings ("70", not 70) despite the spec declaring them as integers — parsed with Number().
• The upstream’s own limit/count query parameters were unreliable in testing: a request with neither set returned the full hit set (45-70+ records) rather than the spec’s documented 5-record default. This pack passes both anyway but also truncates the result client-side, so the response size is bounded regardless of whether the upstream honors either parameter.

Tools

• pearl_search_terms — Search WIPO Pearl for a scientific, technical, or IP legal term and get back matching concept records (concept id, the matched term text, subject field). Use pearl_concept on a returned concept_id t
• pearl_concept — Retrieve the full WIPO Pearl database record for one concept_id (from pearl_search_terms): validated term equivalents grouped by language, each with a reliability rating, a defining context, a usage n
• pearl_subject_fields — List the 29 WIPO Pearl subject-field codes (e.g. “LEGL” = Legal Matters, “CHEM” = Chemical & Materials Technology) and the 10 supported language codes, for use with pearl_search_terms’ subject_field/s