We introduce a new notion of a relational word as a finite totally ordered
set of positions endowed with three binary relations that describe which
positions are labeled by equal data, by unequal data and those having an
undefined relation between their labels. We define the operations of insertion
and deletion on relational words generalizing corresponding operations on
strings. We prove that the transitive and reflexive closure of these operations
has a decidable membership problem for the case of short insertion-deletion
rules (of size two/three and three/two). At the same time, we show that in the
general case such systems can produce a coding of any recursively enumerable
language leading to undecidabilty of reachability questions.Comment: 24 pages, 8 figure
