The point of synaptic GUI’s, and the synaptic web for that matter, is building connections implicitly as you say. Right now the best way to do that is to base them on past usage (in your example the software could observe meta-data of your “context” and connect it to the way you write a date, then later it would guess the format based on similarities of the meta-data to known meta-data), but as technology advances there will certainly be better ways of doing this.

However it is wrong to assume that a lot of memory and processor time is needed to do this, it isn’t. You’re doing most of the hard work in real-time and you should improve your datasets and their derived knowledge incrementally. This ensures that the software is never faced with a mountain of data to process, but rather byte-sized pieces of information that plug into just the right spot on the already built matrix of connections.

Would not hardcoding the use of Delicious/any other fixed repository of information defeat the purpose of a truly synaptic web? Or is this used only as a stepping stone towards a synaptic GUI that would accomodate any arbitrary information connection (e.g. one based not on past action, but the context of those actions)?

I often wish that when performing a mundane task, such as renaming files or some such, that the GUI would figure out after one or two examples of renaming files from something-YYYY-MM-DD.xml to YYYY-MM-DD-something.xml that I want to do this for all of the remaining files of this sort. (Yes, the example is trivial, but it’s only here to prove a point.) Should this connection not be inherent rather than coded?

Keeping in mind that to connect this kind of information, something somewhere would need a lot of memory, processor time and bandwidth, I believe that such a thing would be possible even with what current computing power can provide.