In ["Operator algebras with a faithful weakly-closed representation"](http://www.jstor.org/stable/1969954) (1955), Kadison describes a countable W\*-algebra as a C\*-algebra which has a faithful representation as a countably decomposable ring of operators. Unfortunately I was not able to find any other occurence of this structure in an other article or book. Have you already seen this notion of "countable W\*-algebra" somewhere else?



References on countable W*-algebras
If I'm reading it correctly, "countably decomposable" means that there is no uncountable family of mutually orthogonal nonzero projections. Such von Neumann algebras are now called "$\sigma$-finite".


