Attribute
A characteristic or property of a spatial feature, such as population or land use, stored in a table linked to spatial data.
What is meant by an Attribute?
An attribute refers to a piece of information or data that describes a characteristic or property of a geographic feature in a GIS (Geographic Information System). Attributes are stored in tables and are linked to spatial features such as points, lines, or polygons.
For example, in a map showing cities:
The spatial feature is the location of the city (a point on the map),
The attributes might include the city's name, population, area, or elevation.
Attributes are essential for analysing, querying, and visualizing spatial data. They allow users to understand not just where something is, but also what it is and how it behaves.
Related Keywords
An attribute is a quality or feature that characterizes a thing, someone, or something. It denotes certain information or characteristics—like colour, size, name, or age—that characterize or set one item apart from another in data and databases.
The qualities of spatial features are described via attributes in GIS. In general, they can be divided into two categories: qualitative (categorical) attributes, which define characteristics like soil type or land use, and quantitative (numerical) attributes, which give quantifiable values like temperature, elevation, or population. While certain characteristics are continuous, changing gradually over space, others are discrete, denoting discrete groupings. These attribute types support spatial data analysis, visualization, and decision-making.
An attribute in a database is a particular quality or feature of an entity that is shown as a table column. A "Student" table, for instance, might have characteristics like Name, Age, and StudentID. Each entity can have specified and consistent information thanks to attributes, which aid in the effective organization and storage of data.
A characteristic or property of an object, such as the colour of a car or the population of a city, is called an attribute. In contrast, a variable is a measurable or changeable quantity, such as temperature, age, or income, that can have a range of values in a dataset or experiment. In essence, variables can change and be examined, whereas attributes describe.