Caterpillar Duality for Constraint Satisfaction Problems

The study of constraint satisfaction problems definable in various fragments of Datalog has recently gained considerable importance. We consider constraint satisfaction problems that are definable in the smallest natural recursive fragment of Datalog - monadic linear Datalog with at most one EDB per rule. We give combinatorial and algebraic characterisations of such problems, in terms of caterpillar dualities and lattice operations, respectively. We then apply our results to study graph H-colouring problems.