What is "microdata"

n. 1 (context statistics English) data concerning individuals in a trial, survey etc. 2 (context computing English) data stored in a microformat

In the study of survey and census data, microdata is information at the level of individual respondents. For instance, a national census might collect age, home address, educational level, employment status, and many other variables, recorded separately for every person who responds; this is microdata.

Microdata can mean:

• Microdata (statistics) - Statistical term for individual response data in surveys and censuses
• Microdata (HTML) - a proposal for semantic markup in HTML
• Microdata Corporation - California based computer company

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'.