It is sometimes useful to programmatically load a view in Drupal, to execute it and then utilise the results. This is all straightforward and well documented. A little less documented is how to set the view arguements.
As with a lot of things, once you know it is easy:
$view = views_get_view($view_name); $view->set_arguments($args); $view->execute(); return $view->result;
Where $args is an array, e.g. $args = array($nid).