Abstract This paper addresses the specification of a security policy ontology framework to mediate security policies between virtual organizations (VO) and real organizations (RO). The goal is to develop a common domain model for security policy via semantic mapping. This mitigates interoperability problems that exist due to heterogeneity in security policy data among various (VO) and (RO) in the semantic web. We propose to carry out integration or mapping for only one aspect of security policy, which is authorization policy. Other aspects such as integrity, repudiation and confidentiality will be addressed in future work. We employ various tools such as Protégé, RacerPro and PROMPT to show proof of concept. Keywords Ontology mapping . Semantic mapping . Security policy ontology. Security policy domain model