COEL - 5. Conformance - vague, unstructured

5 Conformance reads in part:

"The Classification of Everyday Living model MUST conform to the conditions set out in Section 3."

Do you mean that the model at http://docs.oasis-open.org/coel/COEL/v1.0/csprd01/model/coel.json must conform to section 3 or that some other model must so conform?

Not the same thing.

It is entirely possible to write this part and include the JSON object definition, which is then referred to by other parts in their conformance clauses.

Conformance then would be:

Any invocation of (JSON object definition sections) MUST conform to that definition, in addition to its conformance to other parts of (whatever your collective name for the standard will be).