Abstract
The paper is centered around the study and comparison of truly concurrent semantics for P/T nets with inhibitor and read arcs (called henceforth contextual P/T nets). We start proposing a causal semantics for P/T nets, that we prove to be equivalent to history preserving bisimulation defined on nonsequential processes. Then we develop a conservative extension of the causal semantics to contextual P/T nets and we prove this one to be finer than step semantics. Finally, a comparison of causal semantics with the process based semantics for contextual P/T systems proposed in \cite{buspin99} is carried out.