Move along, nothing to see here... yet.

After working with v2.0 of SharpMap, it became clear that many aspects of data access and client-side data management could be improved by building data providers on top of IQueryable. This would unify the approach to access data in an I/O-bound layer data (either file-based, server-based or web-based) as well as the session-state dataset (either server-side for web apps or client-side process for smart clients/rich clients).

The idea here (thanks to Ricardo for articulating it well) would be to split out the data access layer which SharpMap uses into a set of interfaces for GIS data providers which SharpMap (or anything) could access via Linq queries.

We'll have to wait until v2.0 of SharpMap is out of the door, however...