If you’re the administrator of a domain, you may have wondered for a while what the expert role does. The answer had been, well, not that much — but we’re pleased to announce that with the latest release, this group of users now has its own permissions. What this means is that domain experts can now help out with documenting the domain. While schema modeling may be difficult to master and perhaps best limited to a smaller set of users (admins), that shouldn’t stop others who have interest and expertise from documenting the properties, types and domain descriptions that appear in the interface.

How do you do it? Well, if you’ve been added as an expert to a domain by an administrator, all you need to do is look for a text description and click it to edit it. For domains and types this can be done from their associated pages by clicking the prominent ‘add/edit description’ button. For properties you can view a property in schema editor and double click on any description to edit it – whether it has a value already or not.

Experts can also modify other elements of the domain homepage such as the news items, help topics and weblinks. We will probably add other capabilities to this role in the future as well, but this seems like a great place to start. So, if you want to pitch in and help, post to a discussion to your favorite domain and ask to be an expert!