Full CRUD access and user permissions and security is provided to all digital objects in the stack.

What makes OSF a complete stack are the connecting scripts and the intermediate Web services layer.

[13] This intermediate OSF Web Services layer may also be accessed directly via API or command line or utilities like cURL, suitable for interfacing with standard content management systems (CMSs), or via a dedicated suite of connectors and modules that leverage the open source Drupal CMS.

[12] The OSF middleware framework is generally RESTful in design and is based on HTTP and Web protocols and W3C open standards.

The initial OSF framework comes packaged with a baseline set of more than 20 Web services in CRUD, browse, search, tagging, ontology management, and export and import.

Each request to an individual Web service returns an HTTP status and optionally a document of resultsets.

[citation needed] The engines layer represents the major workflow requirements and data management and indexing of the system.

This use of a canonical form leads to a simpler design at the core of the stack and a uniform basis to which tools or other work activities can be written.

Documents are indexed by the Solr[14] engine for full-text search, while information about their structural characteristics and metadata are stored in an RDF triplestore database provided by OpenLink's Virtuoso software.

[15] The schema aspects of the information (the "ontologies") are separately managed and manipulated with their own W3C standard application, the OWL API.