This document defines a standard for a formal language to specify policies for radio devices that use cognitive patterns in their operating behavior. IEEE Std 1900.5-2011 defines cognitive radios as a type of radio in which the device is aware of the radio's environment (which can include location, time, or other operational parameters related to communication systems) and internal state and can make decisions about the radio operating behavior based on that information and predefined objectives. To facilitate productive, cooperative behavior in a dynamic ecosystem of communicating devices, the process of decision-making in cognitive radios requires dynamically adaptable guidelines, expressed as policies. Adaptive knowledge capturing, organization, representation, and reasoning is required as environmental awareness and dynamic, objective-steered, decision-making cannot be achieved on a basis of static data and procedures. This standard uses ontological modeling in conjunction with logic rules to provide the informational basis for knowledge representation and entailing statements for cognitive radios. Among other desired operating features that provide significant enhancements over classic hardware-defined radios, cognitive radios are capable of dynamically assessing and accessing available spectrum in wireless communications. A set of base policies augmented by dynamic updates serves as foundation for a cognitive behavior. Dynamic updates solicited by the local device or received asynchronously by other remote cognitive radios can result in local policy and data amendments. Evidently, cognitive radios need to operate under real-time conditions. Therefore, all computational processes involved in information processing including cognition relevant algorithms and their respective underlying structures are required to facilitate these operating requirements in terms of efficiency and effectiveness.