This document specifies the behaviour of web application programming interfaces (APIs) that provide access to tiles of one or more geospatial data resources (collections) that the web API offers.
This document describes how to:

discover which resources offered by the web API can be retrieved as tiles;
get metadata about the available tile sets (including according to which tile matrix set each tile set is partitioned and the limits of that tile set within a common potentially global tile matrix set);
request a tile.

The core conformance class is defined in a way that can be easily included in a web API, even if that API does not conform to the OGC API  –  Common Standard. A web API can combine some requirements classes of this document with those of other OGC API standards (including OGC API  –  Common) to extend the scope of the web API by adding functionality.