Starting with DoDAF 1.5, users are encouraged to build net-centric architectures, and establish capabilities and services provided and used by the architecture. In an operational node definition, you can specify if the node is a service provider, service consumer, or unanticipated user of services.

These three operational node definitions are prepopulated into every encyclopedia. You might create new operational node instances; however the DoDAF specification specifically calls out to categorize nodes by one or more of these three roles.