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My suspicion is that the answer very likely is "No."

But I thought I'd ask anyway.

Various common protocols, standards and technologies have their own logos:

e.g. GSM, Email, RSS, WiFi, HTML5, Bitcoin etc.

Even the concept of sharing across the web has its own representative logo. (Arguably it has several).

Does the family of structured data technologies (Microdata, RDFa, JSON-LD, Schema.org, Microformats etc.) also have a representative logo which can be used on icons?

(Even if it's one that's very rarely seen or used?)

Supporting Information: For the sake of completeness, I should add here, the precise reason why I want to deploy a structured data icon. It's because I am writing a custom CMS, in which - for each page - various types of data are editable.

I am presently building the console which enables the person editing to switch between the types of page data they want to edit (meta data / structured data etc.) and it makes UI sense to include some sort of pictorial representation on each icon which will take them to a different type of data to edit.

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    That depends. Schema.org does not have a logo; you can grab what's in the upper left, on the home page: schema.org - but that's about it. JSON-LD is more visual - see here: json-ld.org/images
    – Henry Visotski
    Commented Dec 6, 2017 at 6:05
  • @HenryVisotski Sounds like an answer! As least as much of an answer as there may be. Cheers!!
    – closetnoc
    Commented Dec 6, 2017 at 6:31
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    I think it makes sense to omit Microformats in this question, because it plays in another league (can’t use vocabularies, is vendor-specific etc.). Their wiki shows several Microformats icons.
    – unor
    Commented Dec 6, 2017 at 7:15
  • @closetnoc Thanks! It's definitely an answer, but I'd say unor has certainly provided the definitive response here.
    – Henry Visotski
    Commented Dec 7, 2017 at 7:16
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    @Rounin In that case, glad I could help! :)
    – Henry Visotski
    Commented Dec 7, 2017 at 23:31

1 Answer 1

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Semantic Web

The W3C provides Semantic Web logos. Here are the versions without the W3C logo:

Semantic Web Cube Alone

Semantic Web Cube with "Semantic Web"

Semantic Web Cube with "Semantic Web"

(usage guidelines)

But in my experience, these logos are used to represent the concept, they don’t necessarily signal that structured data is available for that page.

RDF

For signaling that RDF is available, W3C’s RDF icons are commonly used. Here is the version without the "RDF" label:

RDF blank icon

If the data is available in a separate file, this icon typically links to it. If the data is part of the page (e.g., with RDFa or JSON-LD), the icon either links to a SPARQL endpoint (if available), or is unlinked. The usage guidelines recommend to link to http://www.w3.org/RDF/, "if appropriate", but this is not always useful, of course.

Example: Tim Berners-Lee uses it on his homepage:

Tim Berners-Lee’s homepage

RDF icon for Microdata?

RDFa and JSON-LD are RDF serializations, so it makes sense to show the RDF icon when using these syntaxes.

But Microdata isn’t defined to be a RDF serialization. There are ways to transform Microdata to RDF with some constraints, and such a transformation will likely be part of the new W3C Microdata spec, too. This still doesn’t make it a RDF serialization, though.

So strictly speaking, the RDF icon probably shouldn’t be used when providing the data only in Microdata. Pragmatically speaking, maybe the use makes sense. To avoid this problem, simply use RDFa instead of Microdata ;)

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  • Fantastic and comprehensive answer - thank you, @unor. I note that the logo given for JSON-LD (json-ld.org/images - referenced by HenryVisotski, above) is an enhancement of the standard RDF icon. The Semantic Web icon is the one I like the least... but as a technology-agnostic symbol, it's the kind of thing I am looking for. I think, because I am using exclusively JSON-LD, I will use a monochrome version of json-ld.org/images/json-ld-data-64.png
    – Rounin
    Commented Dec 6, 2017 at 11:06
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    @Rounin: I would say that the RDF icon is also "technology-agnostic", as RDF itself is not a syntax, it’s "just" a way to think of data. And the beauty is that the syntax doesn’t matter -- whether you use RDFa, JSON-LD, RDF/XML, Turtle etc. -- it’s all RDF. So if you want to describe your tech stack, using the JSON-LD logo makes sense (e.g., on an "About this site" page). But if you want to convey that structured data is available (e.g., in the footer of every page), I would go with the RDF icon, as it shouldn’t matter in which syntax the data is provided.
    – unor
    Commented Dec 6, 2017 at 11:47
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    For the sake of completeness, I should add here, the precise reason why I want to deploy a structured data icon. It's because I am writing a custom CMS, in which - for each page - various types of data are editable. I am presently building the console which enables the person editing to switch between the types of page data they want to edit (meta data / structured data etc.) and it makes UI sense to include some sort of pictorial representation on each icon which will take them to a different type of data to edit.
    – Rounin
    Commented Dec 6, 2017 at 13:14

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