The Branching-Time Transformation Technique for Chain Datalog Programs

The branching-time transformation technique has proven to be an efficient approach for implementing functional programming languages. In this paper we demonstrate that such a technique can also be defined for logic programming languages. More specifically, we first introduce Branching Datalog, a language that can be considered as the basis for branching-temporal deductive databases. We then present a transformation algorithm from Chain Datalog programs to the class of unary Branching Datalog programs with at most one IDB atom in the body of each clause. In this way, we obtain a novel implementation approach for Chain Datalog, shedding at the same time new light on the power of branching-time logic programming.