Microdata (HTML)

Microdata is a WHATWG HTML specification used to nest metadata within existing content on web pages.Search engines, web crawlers, and browsers can extract and process Microdata from a web page and use it to provide a richer browsing experience for users. Search engines benefit greatly from direct access to this structured data because it allows search engines to understand the information on web pages and provide more relevant results to users. Microdata uses a supporting vocabulary to describe an item and name-value pairs to assign values to its properties. Microdata is an attempt to provide a simpler way of annotating HTML elements with machine-readable tags than the similar approaches of using RDFa and microformats.

The W3C HTML Working Group failed to find an editor for the specification and terminated its development with a 'Note'.

Microdata vocabularies does not provide the semantics, or meaning of an Item. Web developers can design a custom vocabulary or use vocabularies available on the web. A collection of commonly used markup vocabularies are provided by Schema.org schemas which include: Person, "Place", Event, Organization, Product, Review, Review-aggregate, Breadcrumb, Offer, Offer-aggregate. Major search engine operators like Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! rely on this markup to improve search results. For some purposes, an ad-hoc vocabulary is adequate. For others, a vocabulary will need to be designed. Where possible, authors are encouraged to re-use existing vocabularies, as this makes content re-use easier.

In some cases, search engines covering specific regions may provide locally-specific extensions of microdata. For example, Yandex, a major search engine in Russia, supports microformats such as hCard (company contact information), hRecipe (food recipe), hReview (market reviews) and hProduct (product data) and provides its own format for definition of the terms and encyclopedic articles. This extension was made in order to solve transliteration problems between the Cyrillic and Latin alphabets. Due to the implementation of additional marking parameters of Schema's vocabulary, the indexation of information in Russian-language web-pages became considerably more successful.

...
Wikipedia