This paper investigates presheaf models for process calculi with value passing. Denotational semantics in presheaf models are shown to correspond to operational semantics in that bisimulation obtained from open maps is proved to coincide with bisimulation as defined traditionally from the operational semantics. Both "early" and "late" semantics are considered, though the more interesting "late" semantics is emphasised. A presheaf model and denotational semantics is proposed for a language allowing process passing, though there remains the problem of relating the notion of bisimulation obtained from open maps to a more traditional definition from the operational semantics.

The semantics of process calculi has traditionally been specified by labelled transition systems (ltss), but with the development of name calculi it turned out that reaction rules (i.e., unlabelled transition rules) are often more natural. This leads to the question of how behavioural equivalences (bisimilarity, trace equivalence, etc.) defined for lts can be transferred to unlabelled transition systems. Recently, in order to answer this question, several proposals have been made with the aim of automatically deriving an lts from reaction rules in such a way that the resulting equivalences are congruences. Furthermore these equivalences should agree with the standard semantics, whenever one exists. In this paper we propose saturated semantics, based on a weaker notion of observation and orthogonal to all the previous proposals, and we demonstrate the appropriateness of our semantics by means of two examples: logic programming and open Petri nets. We also show that saturated semantics can be efficiently characterized through the so called semi-saturated games. Finally, we provide coalgebraic models relying on presheaves.