we make the index names very short since they will be used in searches, but we have a lot of indexes, so we would like to have a description of the index names, an put that in a dashboard for easy reference, is there a way to do this in splunk 6?
Sure. Just add the index names along with a description to a look and show this in your dashboard.
http://docs.splunk.com/Documentation/Splunk/6.0.2/SearchTutorial/Usefieldlookups
http://docs.splunk.com/Documentation/Splunk/6.0.2/Knowledge/Addfieldsfromexternaldatasources