How to cite
There are two distinct objects to cite when referencing this work: the book itself, and the formal ontology rendered here. Depending on what your work draws on, you may cite one or both.
Citing the book
If your work engages the philosophical argument of The Geometry of the Good — its claims about obligation, directedness, recognition, fidelity, rupture — cite the book directly.
Chicago
In a footnote or endnote
David R. Koepsell, The Geometry of the Good: The Architecture of Social Being, Book 1 (2025).
MLA
In a works cited list
Koepsell, David R. The Geometry of the Good: The Architecture of Social Being, Book 1. 2025.
APA
In a reference list
Koepsell, D. R. (2025). The Geometry of the Good: The Architecture of Social Being, Book 1.
Citing the ontology artifact
If your work engages this formal rendering — drawing on specific OWL class commitments, citing the BFO mapping of particular concepts, or building derivative artifacts from this ontology — cite the artifact separately.
Chicago
In a footnote or endnote
David R. Koepsell, The Geometry of the Good: A BFO-Aligned Formal Ontology, version 1.0 (Zenodo, May 20, 2026), https://doi.org/.
BibTeX
For LaTeX bibliographies
@misc{koepsell_gog_ontology,
author = {Koepsell, David R.},
title = {The Geometry of the Good:
A BFO-Aligned Formal Ontology},
year = {2026},
publisher = {Zenodo},
version = {1.0},
doi = {},
url = {https://doi.org/},
note = {Formal rendering of the framework developed in
Koepsell, The Geometry of the Good (2025).
BFO-aligned, consistency-validated by HermiT}
}
@book{koepsell_gog_book,
author = {Koepsell, David R.},
title = {The Geometry of the Good: The Architecture
of Social Being, Book 1},
year = {2025}
}
What you should cite separately
The ontology depends on tools and frameworks that have their own citations.
The Basic Formal Ontology
Arp, R., Smith, B., and Spear, A. D. (2015). Building Ontologies with Basic Formal Ontology. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
The HermiT reasoner
Glimm, B., Horrocks, I., Motik, B., Stoilos, G., and Wang, Z. (2014). HermiT: An OWL 2 reasoner. Journal of Automated Reasoning 53(3), 245–269.
BFO-Agent
Koepsell, D. R. (2026). BFO-Agent: A dialogue architecture for ontology extraction with reasoner-validated commitments. (forthcoming.)
Companion artifacts
Other BFO-aligned ontologies by the same author are available and may be cited in parallel where comparison work is involved.
The Spinoza ontology at spinoza.davidkoepsell.com — formal rendering of Spinoza's Ethics, extracted via BFO-Agent's dialogue pipeline with full per-class provenance.
The Leibniz ontology at leibniz.davidkoepsell.com — formal rendering of Duncan's anthology of Leibniz's philosophical works, with degraded per-class provenance disclosed in its methodology page.
Versioning
The ontology is versioned by the SemVer convention. The current version is 1.0, reflecting the state of the ontology at the book's publication. Future revisions will increment the version and receive new DOIs at Zenodo. Cite the version that matches the artifact you actually engaged with.