Nat Torkington from O'Reilly just blogged about the Harbor Info Commons white paper. I really liked his take on our work, specifically defining what he sees as the benefits of the VIA Repository approach:

The MAYA database system is designed by looking at the problem of identifying related information in different databases. In a sense, it's a loose federation system (with migratory caching and all sorts of other stuff built on top) for databases, solving problems that you don't encounter when you implement a single database, but the ones you encounter when you try to deal with dozens of different ones from different organizations.