Abstract
Problem statements often resort to superlatives such as in eg. "...the smallest such number", "...the best approximation", "...the longest such list" which lead to specifications made of two parts: one defining a broad class of solutions (the easy part) and the other requesting the optimal such solution (the hard part). This paper introduces a binary relational combinator which mirrors this linguistic structure and exploits its potential for calculating programs by optimization. This applies in particular to specifications written in the form of Galois connections, in which one of the adjoints delivers the optimal solution being sought. The framework encompasses re-factoring of results previously developed by Bird and de Moor for greedy and dynamic programming, in a way which makes them less technically involved and therefore easier to understand and play with. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.

Abstract
Problem statements often resort to superlatives such as in e.g. " ... the smallest such number", " ... the best approximation", " ... the longest such list" which lead to specifications made of two parts: one defining a broad class of solutions (the easy part) and the other requesting one particular such solution, optimal in some sense (the hard part). This article introduces a binary relational combinator which mirrors this linguistic structure and exploits its potential for calculating programs by optimization. This applies in particular to specifications written in the form of Galois connections, in which one of the adjoints delivers the optimal solution. The framework encompasses re-factoring of results previously developed by Bird and de Moor for greedy and dynamic programming, in a way which makes them less technically involved and therefore easier to understand and play with.

Abstract
This paper presents a strategy for applying sampling techniques to relational databases, in the context of data quality auditing or decision support processes. Fuzzy cluster sampling is used to survey sets of records for correctness of business rules. Relational algebra estimators are presented as a data quality-auditing tool.

Abstract
Music sources are most commontly shared in music scores scanned or printed on paper sheets. These artifacts are rich in information, but since they are images it is hard to re-use and share their content in todays' digital world. There are modern languages that can be used to transcribe music sheets, this is still a time consuming task, because of the complexity involved in the process and the typical huge size of the original documents. WIKI::SCORE is a collaborative environment where several people work together to transcribe music sheets to a shared medium, using the notation. This eases the process of transcribing huge documents, and stores the document in a well known notation, that can be used later on to publish the whole content in several formats, such as a PDF document, images or audio files for example.

Abstract
Music sources are most commonly shared in music scores scanned or printed on paper sheets. These artifacts are rich in information, but since they are images it is hard to re-use and share their content in todays' digital world. There are modern languages that can be used to transcribe music sheets, this is still a time consuming task, because of the complexity involved in the process and the typical huge size of the original documents. WIKI::SCORE is a collaborative environment where several people work together to transcribe music sheets to a shared medium, using the notation. This eases the process of transcribing huge documents, and stores the document in a well known notation, that can be used later on to publish the whole content in several formats, such as a PDF document, images or audio files for example.

Abstract
This paper illustrates the application of formal specification techniques to the experimental development of a CAD tool for building-specification and automatic building-plan plotting. Buildings are specified in an abstract way which records what the architect wants, to build and not how it is actually built in terms of construction materials. Building designs are not recorded in terms of their drawings, but lather in a linguistic way, by structural composition of standard space units according to an abstract syntax equipped with space aggregation constructs, subject to formal properties which check for building well-formedness. A formal model is developed for such an abstract syntax and for its associated functionality which (as later prototyped in a rapid-prototyping shell) has mainly to do with automatically generating building plans from abstract descriptions. At prototype level, this is first achieved by structurally calculating LATEX picture format drawings as a pictorial semantics of the abstract descriptions. In a second phase, the adopted output graphical server is the AUTOCAD(TM) system. Throughout these experiments, not only did formal methods greatly increase confidence on the building-description language correctness, expressive power and conciseness, but also rapid prototyping provided a great deal of insight on the design, at a very low cost. A future implementation is discussed which not only will provide the system as a 'plug-in' extension of AUTOCAD for WINDOWS(TM), but will also connect it to an underlying production database allowing for automatic construction materials planning and budget control.