We present the ideal framework which was recently used to obtain new deep results on Petri nets and extensions. We will present the proof of the famous but unknown Erdös-Tarski theorem. We argue that the theory of ideals prompts a renewal of the theory of WSTS by providing a way to define a new class of monotonic systems, the so-called Well Behaved Transition Systems, which properly contains WSTS, and for which coverability is still decidable by a forward algorithm.