Semantic HTML

Microformats (μF) are predefined HTML markup (like HTML classes) created to serve as descriptive and consistent metadata about elements, designating them as representing a certain type of data (such as contact information, geographic coordinates, events, products, recipes, etc.). They allow software to process the information reliably by having set classes refer to a specific type of data rather than being arbitrary.

Schema.org is a reference website that publishes documentation and guidelines for using structured data mark-up on web-pages (in the form of microdata, RDFa or JSON-LD). Its main objective is to standardize HTML tags to be used by webmasters for creating rich results (displayed as visual data or infographic tables on search engine results) about a certain topic of interest. It is a part of the semantic web project, which aims to make document mark-up codes more readable and meaningful to both humans and machines.

WHATWG HTML specification used to nest metadata within existing content on web. Similar to RDFa.

HTML microformat developed in 2003

RDFa or Resource Description Framework in Attributes is a W3C Recommendation that adds a set of attribute-level extensions to HTML, XHTML and various XML-based document types for embedding rich metadata within web documents. The Resource Description Framework (RDF) data-model mapping enables the use of RDFs for embedding RDF subject-predicate-object expressions within XHTML documents. RDFa also enables the extraction of RDF model triples by compliant user agents.

HTML used to reinforce meaning of documents or webpages