In MINC, attributes are used to specify additional information about an object. These attributes can be considered to fall into three broad categories: Those which are defined by the NetCDF standard itself, those which play a structural role in defining the MINC file organization, and those which contain actual data or parameters associated with the file.
NetCDF attributes may be either global to the file or local to a specific variable. Only two global attributes are used as part of the MINC specification, history and title. These string attributes are both part of the NetCDF specification. All other MINC attributes are local to a specific variable.