The WIPO standards are normative documents in the field of industrial property information and documentation containing rules and recommendations concerning the unified methods of presentation of patent information on various carriers.

The WIPO standards regulate: the form and contents of patent documents; the rules of their indexing, classification and coding; the contents and structure of the official journals and indexes to them; characteristics of the physical carriers of information etc.

The use of the standards by patent offices promotes the harmonization and unification of the patent documentation, provides more efficient international cooperation in the field of patent documentation and standardization, facilitates the international exchange, promotes the overcoming of language barrier. In particular, the knowledge of the current versions of the standards will help the users to orient themselves during search and analysis of the patent documentation of different countries of the world.
The coordination of the works on the development and revision of the standards in the framework of WIPO is exercised by the Standing Committee on Information Technologies, which approves the standards at its plenary sessions.

The Handbook on Industrial Property Information and Documentation, which contains full texts of the WIPO standards in English, French and Spanish is located on the WIPO web site at the following address:

- (http://www.wipo.int/standards/en/part_03_standards.html).