Coding Theory and Applications: 2nd International Castle Meeting, ISMCTA 2008, Castillo de la Mota, Medina del Campo, Spain, September 15-19, 2008, . Computer Science and General Issues)

It is a pleasure to welcome you to the proceedings of the second International Castle Meeting on Coding Theory and its Applications, held at La Mota Castle in Medina del Campo. The event provided a forum for the exchange of results and ideas, which we hope will foster future collaboration. The ?rst meeting was held in 1999, and, encouraged by that experience, we now intend to hold the meeting every three years. Springer kindly accepted to publish the proceedings volume you have in your hands in their LNCS series. The topics were selected to cover some of the areas of research in Coding Theory that are currently receiving the most attention. The program consisted of a mixture of invited and submitted talks, with the focus on quality rather than quantity. A total of 34 papers were submitted to themeeting.Afteracarefulreviewprocessconductedbythescienti?ccommittee aided by external reviewers, we selected 14 of these for inclusion in the current volume, along with 5 invited papers. The program was further augmented by the remaining invited papers in addition to papers on recent results, printed in a separate volume. We would like to thank everyone who made this meeting possible by helping with the practical and scienti?c preparations: the organization committee, the scienti?c committee, the invited speakers, and the many external reviewers who shall remain anonymous. I would especially like to mention the General Advisor ofthe meeting, ØyvindYtrehus.Finally Iextend mygratitudeto allthe authors and participants who contributed to this meeting.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 2nd International Castle Meeting, ISMCTA 2008, Castillo de la Mota, Medina del Campo, Spain, September 2008.

The 14 full papers and 5 invited papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 34 submissions for inclusion in the book. The papers cover network coding, quantum codes, group codes, codes and combinatorial structures, agebraic-geometry codes, as well as codes and applications.