The term domain expert is frequently used in expert systems software development, and there the term always refers to the domain other than the software domain.
- A domain expert is a person with special knowledge or skills in a particular area of endeavor. An accountant is an expert in the domain of accountancy, for example.
- The development of accounting software requires knowledge in two different domains, namely accounting and software.
- Some of the development workers may be experts in one domain and not the other.
DomainExpert is a fancy term to describe people in a company with valuable functional knowledge, often called
DomainKnowledge.
It's a highly useful concept, one which the business community didn't value until a couple of years ago. After firing numerous such people, and not realizing the productivity gains or cost decreases they expected, businesspeople asked why--and finally noticed what's obvious to many of us--employees with specific knowledge in some problem domain are worth their weight in gold. Nowadays, you hear managers in corporations all around the world (who used to extravagantly claim that employees were all fungible commodities--sort of like cattle) speaking of
DomainExperts in reverent tones.
The words "nyah, nyah, told you so" somehow come to mind. :)
I would have thought ExpertSystems, which appeared in the 1980s, would have driven all DomainExperts to oblivion by now. Whatever happened to ExpertSystems? Are these still used to capture key manufacturing/maintenance skills?
You might also add: Whatever happened to
ArtificialIntelligence,
TheInternet?
The terms suffer from being broad, sweeping topics to which you might add:
About What? and
Anchored Where?
To take
ExpertSystems to a cellular level, a
RoboticManufacturingStation is managed by
RobotController, programmed to act as a system to accomplish an action, and becomes such a system. In a sense, any
ComputerProgram or subroutine belongs to
ExpertSystems.
PragmaticThinkingAndLearning discusses the limitations of
ExpertSystems, as discussed by
HubertDreyfus and others. In particular, the
DreyfusModel of expertise shows that an expert may function worse when forced to stick to the rules.
See also
SubjectMatterExpert
CategoryLearningMethods