Recently, some studies linked the computational power of abstract computing
systems based on multiset rewriting to models of Petri nets and the computation
power of these nets to their topology. In turn, the computational power of
these abstract computing devices can be understood by just looking at their
topology, that is, information flow.
Here we continue this line of research introducing J languages and proving
that they can be accepted by place/transition systems whose underlying net is
composed only of joins. Moreover, we investigate how J languages relate to
other families of formal languages. In particular, we show that every J
language can be accepted by a log n space-bounded non-deterministic Turing
machine with a one-way read-only input. We also show that every J language has
a semilinear Parikh map and that J languages and context-free languages (CFLs)
are incomparable