Modern biological research is reliant on the data and tools made available on the web. However, even as the volume of biological data grows, and as new tools arrive to accommodate this growth, putting them to work is not straightforward. Cut and paste, screen scrapers and custom parsers are all common place. Microformats offer an alternative.

Microformats are a collection of keywords that can be placed inside a normal web page to define the data presented by that web page. No special technology is required, and the additional keywords are readable by both humans and machines.