WIPO’s Global Goods & Services Terms Explorer: A Gateway for Precise Terms

Developed by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), the Global Goods & Services (G&S) Terms Explorer is a tool designed to provide assistance to trademark applicants when selecting appropriate G&S terms and their associated Nice classification in different languages during the filing process. This tool also provides support to trademark examiners in IP offices in their validation of trademark applications.

Why It Matters: Precise Term Is the Key

G&S terms play a pivotal role in safeguarding trademarks, as they define the scope of protection for registered marks. If the term scope is, for example too broad, the trademark application could potentially be rejected on the ground that it conflicts with an existing confusingly similar registered trademark. Improper term selection also leads to delays and additional costs in cases where the term is not accepted by the national trademark office or wrongly classified.

The WIPO’s G&S Terms Explorer is based on statistics computed from the largest trademark collections included in WIPO’s Global Brand Database. The G&S terms recommended by the tool have been accepted at least 30 times during the last 10 years by all covered trademark offices.

How to Use: Three Types of Searches

This innovative tool is available free of charge to users ofWIPO’s website, with a user-friendly interface which offers three types of searches:

• Exact: Statistics are displayed for trademarks using the exact entered keyword as one of their goods and services terms.
• String: the results list displays all the recommendable G&S terms in the system that contain the searched String; for example, if you enter “sushi”, the found terms will include “sushi rolling mats”, if you enter “solut”, the results will include “dispute resolution services”;
• Semantic: the keyword entered will be used to return recommended terms that are semantically similar, sorted by decreasing similarity. If you enter sushi, the result will include wasabi, seafood etc. The semantic proximity will be indicated.

String and semantic searches enable the exploration of possible terms, while the exact search helps to assess the acceptability of a given term.

Insights at Your Fingertips: Terms and Beyond

When using the string search, a simple query syntax is available to search alternate substrings (Boolean OR) and combined substrings (Boolean AND), as well as specifying word starts or word ends.

The results list includes the Nice classification information, as well as the number of times the G&S term was used. Clicking on the term will display a graphical view of the number of times the term was accepted by each office over the years.

Clicking on the “Search this in Global Database” button creates a list of details of the trademarks having used the currently selected goods and services terms in the past.

In addition, given a term in a source language, it is possible to explore recommended terms in the other supported languages, sorted by ascending semantic distance. The currently supported languages are English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese (Brazil) and Spanish.

In A Nutshell

Using this new tool to combine the discoverability of most appropriate terms with the assertion of their acceptability in multiple jurisdictions will help the Madrid System users in drafting their international applications.