How to cite
This artifact is a citable scholarly contribution. Please cite it when you draw on its formal commitments, when you use the viewer to make a claim about Spinoza's text, or when you build derivative artifacts (translations, reductions, comparisons with other philosophers).
The persistent identifier is the Zenodo DOI listed below. The DOI resolves to a snapshot of the OWL artifact and accompanying documentation; the artifact is versioned, and the DOI you cite should match the version you used.
Recommended forms
Chicago
In a footnote or endnote
David R. Koepsell, The Ontology of Spinoza's Ethics: A BFO-Aligned Formal Rendering, version 1.0 (Zenodo, May 05, 2026), https://doi.org/.
MLA
In a works cited list
Koepsell, David R. The Ontology of Spinoza's Ethics: A BFO-Aligned Formal Rendering. Version 1.0, Zenodo, May 05, 2026, doi:.
APA
In a reference list
Koepsell, D. R. (May 05, 2026). The Ontology of Spinoza's Ethics: A BFO-Aligned Formal Rendering (Version 1.0) [Data set]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/
BibTeX
For LaTeX bibliographies
@misc{koepsell_spinoza_ontology,
author = {Koepsell, David R.},
title = {The Ontology of Spinoza's Ethics:
A BFO-Aligned Formal Rendering},
year = {2026},
publisher = {Zenodo},
version = {1.0},
doi = {},
url = {https://doi.org/},
note = {Public-domain artifact derived from
Spinoza's Ethics (Elwes trans., 1883)}
}
What you should cite separately
The ontology depends on tools and source material that have their own citations. If your work draws substantively on those, cite them in addition to the artifact:
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.
The Elwes translation
Spinoza, B. (1883). Ethics. Trans. R. H. M. Elwes. London: George Bell and Sons. Public domain. Sourced via Project Gutenberg, ebook 3800.
BFO-Agent (the extraction architecture)
Koepsell, D. R. (2026). BFO-Agent: A dialogue architecture for ontology extraction with reasoner-validated commitments. (forthcoming.)
Versioning
The artifact is versioned by the SemVer convention. The major version increments when ontological commitments change in ways that break consistency with prior renderings (e.g., a class is removed or its BFO type is changed). The minor version increments when classes or individuals are added without breaking prior commitments. The patch version increments for documentation, comment, or label changes that do not affect the ontological structure.
Each released version is independently archived at Zenodo and gets its own DOI. The DOI you should cite is the one matching the version you actually used in your work. The version-independent DOI (which always resolves to the latest) is provided for convenience but should be avoided in scholarly citations because it may resolve differently in the future.
Reproducibility
The artifact is fully reproducible from its inputs: the Elwes translation, the BFO core, the bfo_relations seed, and the BFO-Agent session logs. The session logs are deposited alongside the OWL file at the same Zenodo record. A researcher who wants to verify the extraction may re-run the validation pipeline against the deposited inputs and confirm consistency.
The session logs are themselves a kind of citation: they record exactly which passages produced which commitments, with timestamps and reasoner verdicts. If you wish to dispute a particular commitment, the session log is where you find what was said and what was decided.