schema.org

Schema.org is a set of standards for embedding semantic information in human-readable web pages. Various mechanisms had emerged as de-facto standards, including microformats, but largely for very particular data types and applications. Several major vendors worked together to create the standards in schema.org, partly to enable better web scraping by their own crawlers. Schema.org defines vocabularies of semantic terms (e.g. around personal information, or events) and multiple ways that these can be embedded into web pages backwards compatible with the earlier emergent standrads.