A method for processing information on compounds of molecular classes sharing common building blocks. The method comprises maintaining pathway information on the compounds at individual compound level and/or generic class level (13-1); generating a diversity of the compounds based on a set of seed structures, each seed structure describing a lipid compound having a higher-than-average likelihood to occur in nature (13-2); using a formal description language to express the seed structures (13-3); using the structural elements to generate expected spectra for each compound, by using known experimental conditions for mass spectrometry (13-4); performing one or more spectroscopy experiments to obtain compound information (13-5); and linking the obtained compound information to existing information on the molecular classes (13-6).