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In section 4.4, the statement is made (after the first set of numbered items) about "This proposal...". THIS (specification) is no longer a proposal. (I suspect that this some left-over text from this section was a proposal.) Also, this statement states that the "proposal" pertains SML model validation, not SML-IF validation. This statement is confusing to the reader. If the "proposal" pertains to SML model validation, why is it in the Interchange specification. This statement needs to be clarified.
Agree that "this proposal" needs to be fixed. For an SML-IF document, there are 2 kinds of validation that can be performed. One is to check whether it is a valid IF document, by validating it against the IF schema. This only checks the structure of the document (e.g. <instances> contains <document>s). The other kind of validation is to check whether the model being packaged in this IF document is valid, by performing "SML model validation" (e.g. check SML references, Schematron rules). To ensure inter-op, the IF spec needs to provide enough constraints to ensure that the second kind of (model) validation always produces the same result for the same IF document. This explains why "schema binding", though an IF mechanism, is specifically for SML model validation. That said, if the quoted sentence (after fixing "this proposal") confused one WG member, then it may confuse other readers too. Some word-smithing may be required. Not my expertise (and it was me who produced this confusing sentence).
The sentence "This proposal..." was odd given the surrounding context. The following change was made to fix this. From: So it is clear that SML-IF cannot guarantee general case interoperability based only on XML Schema given the constraints above and, therefore, needs to specify how to determine such associations. This proposal concerns only SML model validation and not SML-IF validation (against the IF schema). Unless otherwise indicated, "validation" or "validity" in the following sections refers to SML model validation. To: So it is clear that SML-IF cannot guarantee general case interoperability based only on XML Schema given the constraints above and, therefore, needs to specify how to determine such associations. This section describes a method to achieve this goal.