The Bioethics Online Information System (Sistema Informativo per la Bioetica in Linea, SIBIL) was born from a research project undertaken by the Documentation Sector of the Istituto Superiore di Sanità (ISS) in 2001 with the aim of providing an updated Italian overview of the various information and training channels on bioethics issues, through the homonymous database and a series of additional services.
Database
The SIBIL bibliographic database collects the documentary material of bioethical interest published in Italy since 1995, cataloged and indexed through a specially created thesaurus, the Tesauro Italiano di Bioetica (TIB, the Italian Thesaurus of Bioethics). The documentary fund of the database is represented by periodicals, monographs, monograph chapters, grey literature (e.g. technical reports), opinions of ethics committees, laws and normative documents in general, including the main documents of international legislation. Where possible, access to the full text of the documents in electronic format is provided.
Tesauro Italiano di Bioetica (TIB)
The Italian thesaurus of bioethics includes over 1,000 terms that reflect the essential concepts of specialized bioethical language and related disciplines, used for indexing the documentary material collected and cataloged in the SIBIL database.
The thesaurus contains hierarchical and associative relationships between the terms, of which it reports synonyms and almost synonyms, and is entirely available and downloadable from the Internet, both in the Italian version and in the bilingual Italian-English edition.
