The SIB is an academic not-for-profit foundation established on March 30, 1998 whose mission is to promote research, the development of databanks and computer technologies, teaching and service activities in the field of bioinformatics, in Switzerland with international collaborations.

The Swiss-Prot group, directed by Amos Bairoch, is "équipe associée" (associated team) to Helix. This SIB - Helix association is named Sibelius.

The two research themes of Sibelius are motivated by the same objective to help the Swiss-Prot protein knowledgebase annotators in their task of exploring the literature and to ensure the consistency of the annotations:

 the HAMAP project (High-quality Automated and Manual Annotation of microbial Proteomes) for which the knowledge based system Herbs is being developped

 the development of probabilistic information retrieval tools, in close association with XRCE, the Xerox Research Center Europe (Meylan, near Grenoble).