A note on monadic datalog on unranked trees

Abstract

In the article 'Recursive queries on trees and data trees' (ICDT'13), Abiteboul et al., asked whether the containment problem for monadic datalog over unordered unranked labeled trees using the child relation and the descendant relation is decidable. This note gives a positive answer to this question, as well as an overview of the relative expressive power of monadic datalog on various representations of unranked trees.