food nerd question

So I have this frustration with spices where I don't know what goes with what and my nose won't tell me. It's like being tone-deaf for food, and it means I can only cook with a recipe in front of me, which is a problem because I haaate recipe-hunting. Anyway, I got to wondering last night: are there any formal models out there of the similarity of spices and herbs? By similarity I am thinking particularly of "often used together or in similar contexts," but "similar in flavor" or "similar in chemical composition" would also work.

I'm sure an enterprising person could create one, if not, by feeding an assload of recipes to some kind of multidimensional-scaling or self-organizing-map algorithm, but A) I don't know how to do that and B) it sounds like work. So if any of you food nerds know of such a thing, please enlighten me!