The software environment currently found in the analytical community consists of a patchwork of incompatible software, proprietary and non-standardized file formats, which is further complicated by incomplete, inconsistent and potentially inaccurate metadata. To overcome these issues, the Allotrope Foundation develops a comprehensive and innovative Framework consisting of metadata dictionaries, data standards, and class libraries for managing analytical data throughout its lifecycle. The talk describes how laboratory data and their semantic metadata descriptions are brought together to ease the management of vast amount of data that underpin almost every aspect of drug discovery and development.