Evolution of Microformats

For the last year or so I've been keeping an eye out for interesting articles on the Semantic Web, NLP (Natural Language Processing) and other goodies. Most of the work around the Semantic Web seems to be defining ways to annotate your content to contain semantic information. Other work centers around using NLP to extract semantic information from content that isn't marked up.

Microformats (www.microformats.org) falls into the first camp. Instead of being accademic, however, they offer very practical ways to add semantic information to your content (i.e., this represents a person, event, etc ...). As simple as the formats are, nobody is going to add this to content without the help of tools .

My questions are how will new Microformats (or whatever ends up being used by our tools) be derived? Will there be a voting procedure? Some sort of standards group? I can image lots and lots of different formats. And how will those be integrated into new tools?

One final thought is: will advances in NLP make semantic markup obsolete?