  We present an abstract formulation of the so-called Innsbruck-Hannover
programme that investigates quantum correlations and entanglement in terms of
convex sets. We present a unified description of optimal decompositions of
quantum states and the optimization of witness operators that detect whether a
given state belongs to a given convex set. We illustrate the abstract
formulation with several examples, and discuss relations between optimal
entanglement witnesses and n-copy non-distillable states with non-positive
partial transpose.
