The invention provides a system adapted to enable contextual collaboration
within a computer network. The invention provides a collaboration manager
that supports manipulation of collaboration spaces. The collaboration
spaces contain one or more collaboration elements that have potentially
different collaboration modalities. The context manager maintains
resources and resource interrelationships within contexts. The resources
can include collaboration elements, processes, tasks, business objects,
users, and/or roles. A view generator selects a set of the resources to
be displayed to a user of the computer network. The invention also
includes an interface adapted to allow applications to specify commands
to manipulate collaboration spaces, commands to maintain resources and
resource interrelationships within contexts, and queries for
context-sensitive views.