1. At a computer system configured to provide a context based work environment, a method for mining relationships to capturing references relevant to a context, the method comprising: an act of submitting query criteria to the context through a common external behavior of the context, the common external behavior being common to the context and one or more other contexts, the common external behavior providing a common interface such that different applications can uniformly submit queries to the context and to the one or more other contexts; an act of the context internally identifying any references in the context that satisfy the query criteria in accordance with internal behavior specific to the context; an act of determining that a second context with potentially relevant references is within a relevance threshold of the context, the second context being one of the one or more other contexts; an act of recursively submitting the query criteria to the second context through the common external behavior; and an act of the second context identifying any references in the second context that satisfy the query criteria in accordance with internal behavior specific to the second context.