Editing Chemical database (section)

==Descriptors==
All properties of molecules beyond their structure can be split up into either physico-chemical or [[pharmacological]] attributes also called descriptors. On top of that, there exist various artificial and more or less standardized naming systems for molecules that supply more or less ambiguous names and [[synonym]]s. The [[IUPAC name]] is usually a good choice for representing a molecule's structure in a both [[human-readable]] and unique [[string (computer science)|string]] although it becomes unwieldy for larger molecules. [[Trivial name]]s on the other hand abound with [[homonym]]s and synonyms and are therefore a bad choice as a [[primary key|defining database key]]. While physico-chemical descriptors like [[molecular weight]], ([[partial charge|partial]]) charge, [[solubility]], etc. can mostly be computed directly based on the molecule's structure, pharmacological descriptors can be derived only indirectly using involved multivariate statistics or experimental ([[Sampling (statistics)|screening]], [[bioassay]]) results. All of those descriptors can for reasons of computational effort be stored along with the molecule's representation and usually are.