(1) A characteristic or trait of an entity that describes the entity; for example, the telephone number of an employee is one of that employee's attributes.
(2) In user interface manager (UIM) tag language, an identifier used with related material that takes on a specific meaning, such as an action to be taken or the characteristics of text or data.
(3) In object oriented programming, a property of an object or class that can be distinguished distinctly from any other properties. Attributes often describe state information.
(4) A property, quality, or characteristic whose value contributes to the specification of an element or program function. For example, "cost" or "location" are attributes that can be assigned to a resource. See also array attribute, simple attribute, single-cardinality attribute.
(5) Data associated with a component. For example, a server component might have attributes such as host name, IP address, operating system type, operating system version, number of CPUs, CPU speed, type of RAM, number of hard drives, network domain, and so on.
(6) Descriptive information that provides important details about a requirement or discussion.
(7) The information, data, or properties that belong to instances of a classifier.
(8) In markup languages such as SGML, XML, and HTML, a name-value pair within a tagged element that modifies features of the element.
(9) A system or application element being monitored by a monitoring agent, such as Disk Name and Disk Read/Writes Per Second.