HTML5 what is the itemscope attribute and what does it do in laymans terms?

Question

I just wanted to know what is the HTML5 itemscope attribute used for basically?

Answer 1

Search engines including Bing, Google, and Yahoo! are now using itemscope and friends to identify semantic data in webpages. On the website schema.org, they have an explanation of how to use itemscope with predefined schemas to improve the data that is provided to search engines.

http://schema.org/docs/gs.html