An independent method for configuring and extracting detailed manufacturing knowledge for fabricating an object, tool or part and storing the data to a data file or data structure. The method includes extracting design criteria from a data file and parsing criteria into elemental manufacturing building modules independent of the data file and storing the captured criteria data file. Additional manufacturing knowledge is then inputted into the meta-data file not contained in the data file by extracting manufacturing knowledge from a database housing manufacturing knowledge and incorporating this knowledge into data file which is capable of being translated to Numerical Control machine language.