Should "follows" and "followed by" be transitive?

[ajnelson-nist]

Hello,

I was reading through SWO, and noticed these properties:

swo:SWO_0000301
	a owl:ObjectProperty ;
	rdfs:label "follows" ;
	.

swo:SWO_0000131
	a owl:ObjectProperty ;
	rdfs:label "directly preceded by" ;
	rdfs:subPropertyOf swo:SWO_0000301 ;
	.

swo:SWO_0000300
	a owl:ObjectProperty ;
	rdfs:label "followed by" ;
	.

swo:SWO_0000132
	a owl:ObjectProperty ;
	rdfs:label "directly followed by"@en ;
	rdfs:subPropertyOf swo:SWO_0000300 ;
	.

I see the remark on swo:SWO_0000300 noting the history of how BFO's "precedes" (BFO_0000063) was previously being used.

I've seen a pattern in some other models¹ (SKOS and the Collections Ontology) where a specific-successor predicate is specified as a subproperty of a parent ordering predicate that is also defined to be a owl:TransitiveProperty. (SKOS has skos:broader as a subproperty of skos:broaderTransitive. CO today has "has next item" as a subproperty of "followed by".)

BFO_0000063 shares this pattern with RO_0002090 ("immediately precedes").

Should SWO_0000300 and SWO_0000301 also be declared transitive?

Last, from seeing a piece of this repository's Issue template: if you see fit to attribute me for any reason, my ORCID is 0000-0002-3771-570X. Acknowledgement is not required, but appreciated.

Footnotes

1. Disclaimer: Participation by NIST in the creation of the documentation of mentioned software is not intended to imply a recommendation or endorsement by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, nor is it intended to imply that any specific software is necessarily the best available for the purpose. ↩