Engineering and Management, American Society of Civil Engineers. It incorporates referee's comments but changes resulting from the publishing process, such as copyediting, structural formatting, may not be reflected in this document.

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Distributed collaborative design and manufacture enables manufacturing organizations in maintaining competitiveness in the fiercely competitive global industry. This requires the distributed system not only maintains data consistency across globally distributed location seamlessly, but also allows team members to access storage system and computing resources transparently and securely. In this paper, a framework for distributed collaborative engineering developed on the Grid platform is introduced. The system architecture is presented for this framework. This paper also describes data Grid, computational Grid and data compression to support collaboration efficiently.

Ribbons may be used for the modeling of DNAs and proteins. The topology of a ribbon can be described by the link Lk, while its geometry is represented by the writhe Wr and the twist Tw. These three quantities are numerical integrals and are related by a single formula from knot theory. This article discusses the meanings of these three quantities, offers an approach for calculating their numerical values, and provides some examples.