9. A system comprising: a pen driver coupled to a pen-based input tablet and configured to collect and organize received ink information into ink strokes; an ink memory area organized into one or more ink phrase data structures; and an ink manager coupled to the pen driver for receiving the ink strokes, the ink manager having an ink phrase termination engine configured to detect the occurrence of an ink phrase termination event from the ink information; whereby the ink information entered at the pen-based input tablet is associated with a client application; and the ink manager stores the ink strokes received prior to the ink phrase termination event in a selected ink phrase data structure and, in response to receiving from the client application a reference context affiliated with the un-recognized ink strokes of the ink phrase, associates the reference context with the ink strokes, where the ink manager associates the reference context with the un-recognized ink strokes by appending the reference context to the selected ink phrase data structure.
10. The system of claim 9 , where the ink manager, in response to the occurrence of an ink phrase termination event, passes the un-recognized ink strokes of the respective ink phrase to the client application.