Relationship collaboration system

A computer implemented method comprising:

• collecting data from an electronic mail system including an electronic address book, the address book associated with a contact owner and including a plurality of contacts and corresponding contact information, the collected data including one or more values related to strength of a relationship between the contact owner and each of the contacts, wherein at least one of the values is a quantity regarding email communications between a respective contact and the contact owner;
• extracting from the collected data, strength data, which includes one or more of how long the contact has been stored, how frequently the contact has been accessed, how recently the contact has been accessed or modified, whether the contact owner appears to have an identifiable association with the contact or entity, a type of association such as duration, frequency, recency or role, an amount and type of contact data, a pattern and frequency and recency of communication;
• determining a strength score representative of strength of the relationship between the contact owner and one of the contacts using a set of algebraically expressed heuristic rules, with the strength score based at least in part on the quantity regarding email communications and the extracted strength data, wherein the step of determining a strength score includes monitoring email traffic between the contact owner and contacts within organizations, analyzing contact information in the email traffic between the organizations and the contact owner, and incorporating such analysis into the strength score;
• storing the collected data, the extracted strength data, and the strength score in a computer database;
• filtering the collected data and determined strength score to exclude from the computer database collected data that falls below at least one of a relevance threshold and a quality threshold;
• computing on a substantially continuous scale the strength of the relationship relative to other relationships in the collected data;
• receiving a query for contacts having desired characteristics;
• and
• returning a list of contact owners corresponding to relationships with contacts or entities having the desired characteristics, wherein the list includes the contact owner.