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Taking these concepts and trying to tie them back into what programmers do, so that the experience of building a knowledge graph database is not alien is essential if this is going to become mainstream tech.
We[1] started building with OWL, the web ontology language, to represent the shape of the graph. This made sense because OWL is a very rich language for describing graphs. However it also has drawbacks. It is very hard - and alien to common experience - for developers to read OWL. It was not built to describe schemata but rather ontologies (to describe what could be represented, rather than what must be represented). It also had no concept of a document, and as we were trying to build a document-oriented knowledge graph, we had to graft one onto it, which became a source of confusion for our users.
Eventually - with much pain and time - we decided to simplify the interface, make the concept of the document more central, make the primary interaction method be through json documents and create a schema language that looks like the JSON you hope to build (and feels more like one you might write in a programming language).
It is early days for the relaunched version (and we had to swallow the frustration of such a deep breaking change), but it certainly feels like regular programmers are now able to quickly build knowledge graphs. The combination of graph, schema, and document is powerful.