Patent ID: 7254589

Claim:
An apparatus for managing and inferencing contexts and contextual relationships between resources comprising: an application program interface (API), the API receiving queries about contextual relationships including creating or removing context, link context and ontology definitions, add or remove resources and interrelationships in and from context, and retrieve resource relationships; a context engine, coupled to receive and process requests from the API; an ontology manager accessible by the context engine and adapted to interpret ontology semantics and answer queries about contextual relationships; and one or more context stores accessible by the context engine, the context engine using ontology semantics derived from the ontology manager to describe contextual relationships and storing the contextual relationships in one or more of the plurality of context stores, contextual relationship data stored in the context stores being accessed by the context engine to answer queries received from the API, wherein said ontology manager is operationally coupled with a working memory that holds at least part of relationship facts from said one or more context stores and said contexts provide one or more mechanisms for recording a current status of one or more resources by representing relationships among objects, roles, and processes explicitly or implicitly used in said resources.