Chemical Thesaurus 4.0

A thesaurus, from the Greek, is a storehouse, and the Chemical Thesaurus is a storehouse of information about chemical species and chemical interactions and reactions. The software behaves rather like the thesaurus built into your word processor which allows you to jump from word to word to word by meaning:

happy -> delighted -> wild -> savage -> crude -> raw -> uncooked...

Likewise, the chemical thesaurus allows you to move from chemical species to chemical species (via their chemical reactions):

natural gas -> methane -> hydrogen cyanide -> adiponitrile -> 1,6-diaminohexane -> nylon-6,6

The software uses a relational database to store information about any chemical reaction process, including: radiochemistry, phase change, resonance structure interconversion, interchanging conformation, single electron transfer, complexation, substitution-displacement-transfer (which are mechanistically equivalent), redox reactions, photochemistry, rearrangements, multi-step mechanisms, synthetic pathways, simple (non-feedback controlled) biosynthetic pathways, etc., etc., etc.

The application software is extensively hyper-linked. Just click around, explore, discover... Learn how the application works.

It is not possible to add all chemistry to any one database. The decision has therefore been made to fill The Chemical Thesaurus with as much fundamental chemistry as possible. It is hoped that the database contains all of the reaction chemistry knowledge that a chemistry major would be expected to be familiar, specialist modules excepted.

The present free version is close to comprehensive with respect to: isotopes and major decay pathways, the periodic table, atomic ions, main group chemistry, organic chemistry expressed in terms of generic functional group reactions and industrial chemistry. There are 100 hydrogen reactions and over 500 for water. No other chemistry database provides access to this type of chemical information.

Although the database does have references to the primary and secondary literature, the data is mainly at textbook level. However, this should be seen as a strength, not a weakness because The Chemical Thesaurus attempts to model reaction chemistry space from the ground up. Therefore it deals with the simple and well known material first.

The application software is extensively hyper-linked so that it acts as a point-and-click chemical thesaurus. Just click and go.