RDFa (or Resource Description Framework – in – attributes) is a W3C Recommendation that adds a set of attribute-level extensions to XHTML for embedding rich metadata within Web documents. The RDF data-model mapping enables its use for embedding RDF subject-predicate-object expressions within XHTML documents, it also enables the extraction of RDF model triples by compliant user agents.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RDFa
In my words: Using RDFa turns the existing human-visible text into machine-readable data without repeating content. The browser still presents a website, but at the same time the website with RDFa can function as a database. Based on that RDFa database, we can build new applications, like the Wiki9999 project.
Links: