Completeness and incompleteness in nominal Kleene algebra

Abstract

Gabbay and Ciancia (2011) presented a nominal extension of Kleene algebra as a framework for trace semantics with statically scoped allocation of resources, along with a semantics consisting of nominal languages. They also provided an axiomatization that captures the behavior of the scoping operator and its interaction with the Kleene algebra operators and proved soundness over nominal languages. In this paper, we show that the axioms proposed by Gabbay and Ciancia are not complete over the semantic interpretation they propose. We then identify a slightly wider class of language models over which they are sound and complete.