Method and apparatus for defining relationships between collaboration entities in a collaboration environment

摘要

In a software environment for team collaboration, a relationship processor defines relationships between collaboration entities (artifacts) in the collaboration environment. The relationship processor is operable to define, capture, and traverse relationships in a generic manner independently of the underlying types of artifacts included in the relationships. Accordingly, participant artifacts of such a relationship may be a set of workspace artifacts of dissimilar types, and may be associated by a 1:1, a 1:N, or an N:M relation. Therefore, relationships may include individual or sets of artifacts of various cardinality and directionality, as discussed further above. A relationship processor captures the defined relationships in a set of DB tables. The tables enumerate the related entities of the various types instantiated by the applications operative in the workspace. In this manner, the workspace employs a variety of type-unrestricted artifacts for further processing and/or organization.