The ENFORCE project was a multi-disciplinary research project that brought together the perspectives of computer science, law, social science and risk management with the aim of developing methods for trust management. Interactions between people, enterprises, private and public organizations, governmental agencies are increasingly taking place over electronic networks such as the Internet. The information society of today therefore ever more depends on such networks for the exchange of information and services. Since trust is often a precondition for interactions to take place, there is increasingly a need for methods and technologies to assess the trustworthiness of other actors and entities, to understand the involved risks, and to identify means to ensure well-founded trust and to mitigate risks. 

The aim of the ENFORCE project was to deliver:

• A conceptual framework for trust management
• A method for the capture and analysis of policies for trust management
• A policy specification language with formal semantics
• A method for legal risk analysis
• A language customized for the specification of and reasoning about legal risks
• Documentation of empiric experiences and results from using the above in case studies

ENFORCE was a joint initiative between

• Department of Information Science and Media, University of Bergen
• Norwegian Research Center for Computers and Law, University of Oslo
• SINTEF ICT in Oslo
• Department of Informatics, University of Oslo

The project combined the experience of three principal researchers – a lawyer, a philosopher and a computer scientist – with strong international academic and industrial reputation, with the initiatives and creativity of two doctoral students, and three visiting researchers.

ENFORCE was funded by the Research Council of Norway and ran from 2005 until 2009.