Microformats (indirectly) become part of the W3C's Semantic Web initiative. Here is the introduction from the press release announcement.

Today, the World Wide Web Consortium forged an important link between Semantic Web and microformats communities. With "Gleaning Resource Descriptions from Dialects of Languages", or GRDDL (pronounced "griddle"), software can automatically extract information from structured Web pages to make it part of the Semantic Web. Those accustomed to expressing structured data with microformats in XHTML can thus increase the value of their existing data by porting it to the Semantic Web, at very low cost.

Press Release, W3C CRDDL Working Group

You can read more about the group in the W3C GRDDL Working Group working draft documents.