This property specifies that the temporal extent of the domain instance A of E2 Temporal Entity starts definitely before the start of the temporal extent of the range instance B of E2 Temporal Entity.
In other words, if A = [Astart, Aend] and B = [Bstart, Bend], we mean Astart < Bstart is true.
This property is part of the set of temporal primitives P173 – P176, P182 – P185.
This property corresponds to a disjunction (logical OR) of the following Allen temporal relations [Allen, 1983]: {before, meets, overlaps, contains, finished-by}
This property is transitive.
Figure 7: Temporal entity A starts before the start of temporal entity B. Here A is longer than B
Figure 8: Temporal entity A starts before the start of temporal entity B. Here A is shorter than B