It has been claimed that relational properties among chemical substances are at the core of chemistry. Here we show that chemical elements and a wealth of their trends can be found by the study of a relational property: the formation of binary compounds. We say that two chemical elements A and B are similar if they form binary compounds AC and BC, C being another chemical element. To allow the richness of chemical combinations, we also included the different stoichiometrical ratios for binary compounds. Hence, the more combinations with different chemical elements, and with similar stoichiometry, the more similar two chemical elements are. We studied 4,700 binary compounds by using network theory and point set topology, we obtained well-known chemical families of elements, such as: alkali metals, alkaline earth metals, halogens, lanthanides, actinides, some transition metal groups and chemical patterns like: singularity principle, knight’s move, and secondary periodicity. The methodology applied here can be extended to the study of ternary, quaternary and other compounds, as well as other chemical sets where a relational property can be defined.