Hi David, Thanks for your words of encouragement! As you suggest, this is a very useful learning exercise for me. I hope it is also contributing in some small way towards the original purpose - seeking standard formats for documenting/diagramming NLP Patterns. Your suggestions for the diagram are very useful, but I think it's important to recognise the limitations of the State-diagram format (which are also its strengths!). State-diagrams focus on a limited set of information - there's massive deletion/distortion, in order to highlight one aspect of the pattern clearly (the states involved, and the transitions between them) - so it's important not to try to get them to do too much, otherwise you risk losing that clarity. An analogy might be the classic map of the London Underground system - see http://map.tfl.gov.uk/map.asp for an example. It's a highly stylised representation of the real world - if you overlayed a street map, you'd see there are massive distortions from "geographic reality" - but is very useful for its intended purpose - allowing people to plan a trip from one station to another. Actually the link above is a good example of what I'm thinking of! If you click on the name of one of the stations, you'll see a menu appears, on which you can click to open a window with more info about Train Times, Bus Connections, and so on. I'd suggest that there is a lot of information we want to record for each state - the procedural steps you go through in that state, and variables such as scope, focus, resources.... So, in your example, when you click on the "3rd Position" box of the state-diagram, you'd get a pop-up menu, and one of the options would be "Scope". When you clicked on "Scope" it would open a new window with the diagram you describe, and additional text as required. I wonder if John and Carmen (or anyone else) have a complete/partial list of the attributes/variables it would be useful to record for each state? Thanks again for your suggestion, David. It helped me to clarify my thinking! Cheers, Jon