  In this paper we revisit some pioneering efforts to equip Petri nets with
compact operational models for expressing causality. The models we propose have
a bisimilarity relation and a minimal representative for each equivalence
class, and they can be fully explained as coalgebras on a presheaf category on
an index category of partial orders. First, we provide a set-theoretic model in
the form of a a causal case graph, that is a labeled transition system where
states and transitions represent markings and firings of the net, respectively,
and are equipped with causal information. Most importantly, each state has a
poset representing causal dependencies among past events. Our first result
shows the correspondence with behavior structure semantics as proposed by
Trakhtenbrot and Rabinovich. Causal case graphs may be infinitely-branching and
have infinitely many states, but we show how they can be refined to get an
equivalent finitely-branching model. In it, states are equipped with
symmetries, which are essential for the existence of a minimal, often
finite-state, model. The next step is constructing a coalgebraic model. We
exploit the fact that events can be represented as names, and event generation
as name generation. Thus we can apply the Fiore-Turi framework: we model causal
relations as a suitable category of posets with action labels, and generation
of new events with causal dependencies as an endofunctor on this category. Then
we define a well-behaved category of coalgebras. Our coalgebraic model is still
infinite-state, but we exploit the equivalence between coalgebras over a class
of presheaves and History Dependent automata to derive a compact
representation, which is equivalent to our set-theoretical compact model.
Remarkably, state reduction is automatically performed along the equivalence.
