In this paper we study a subclass of pebble automata (PA) for data languages
for which the emptiness problem is decidable. Namely, we introduce the
so-called top view weak PA. Roughly speaking, top view weak PA are weak PA
where the equality test is performed only between the data values seen by the
two most recently placed pebbles. The emptiness problem for this model is
decidable. We also show that it is robust: alternating, nondeterministic and
deterministic top view weak PA have the same recognition power. Moreover, this
model is strong enough to accept all data languages expressible in Linear
Temporal Logic with the future-time operators, augmented with one register
freeze quantifier.Comment: An extended abstract of this work has been published in the
proceedings of the 34th International Symposium on Mathematical Foundations
of Computer Science (MFCS) 2009}, Springer, Lecture Notes in Computer Science
5734, pages 712-72