Abstract. Recently, there have been a number of proposals for languages for expressing web service constraints and capabilities, with WSPolicy and WSPL leading the way. The proposed languages, although relatively inexpressive, suffer from a lack of formal semantics. In this paper, we provide a mapping of WS-Policy to the description logic fragment species of the Web Ontology Language (OWL-DL), and describe how standard OWL-DL reasoners can be used to check policy conformance and perform an array of policy analysis tasks. OWL-DL is much more expressive than WS-Policy and thus provides a framework for exploring richer policy languages.