Standardized support for management of contextual relationships, which includes specification of the context hierarchy, association of relationships with a particular context, and derivation of transitive dependencies, is provided with a Context Manager service. The Context Manager provides a programmatic interface for defining contexts and the relationships therein. The Context Manager saves the relationship facts in one or more context stores, which are organized by contexts. The Context Manager interfaces with the Ontology Manager that processes queries on relationships with respect to a given set of contexts. The Context Manager provides a high-level abstraction for relationship management in a context. Developers of business solutions can then focus on the core business logic, without worrying about the details of storing and inferencing relationships.