Attributes

["VAMBENEPE,WILLIAM (HP-Cupertino,ex1)" <vbp@hp.com>]

For is an improved definition and a "why" section for attributes:

What?

Attribute support represents a schema to describe queryable information
provided by a Web service and portType operations to access and set this
information. Attributes should be introspect-able at design time and
runtime. Attribute is synonymous with property. For manageability, a
property is a name, type, value triple that is part of the advertised
manageability interface for a resource. An attribute can be used to
represent configuration values, metrics, identifiers, etc.

Why?

Many manageability capabilities of a manageable resource take the form of
information about the resource that the manager is able to query and set.
While these can be accessed through individual and special WSDL operations,
in management scenarios it is often required to access this information in
more efficient ways (like bulk get). In order to allow these scenarios, such
information should be modeled as a set of attributes (or properties) with
access methods that allow access to it in ways that meet the scalability
requirements of management applications.