CREATING YOUR LOUISI ANA-FRIENDLY YARD

A Louisiana-Friendly Yard doesn’t merely offer a good-looking landscape, it also becomes an asset to the local environment, protecting natural resources and preserving our state’s unique beauty. An important part in creating a Louisiana-Friendly Yard is recognizing that the home landscape is connected to and a part of a larger natural system.

Designing a landscape more in harmony with the environment requires commitment and careful planning and largely depends on what you and your family require from the landscape. You should consider:

1. Your family’s needs and desires.
2. The conditions of your site.
3. Maintaining a healthy environment.

Understanding a few basic concepts will help you make environmentally appropriate decisions when planning your landscape and avoid potential problems.

PROPER PLANNING IS CRITICAL

On average, a welldesigned landscape provides enough energy savings to return your initial investment in less than 8 years. An 8-foot (2.4-meter) deciduous (leaf-shedding) tree, for example, costs about as much as an awning for one large window and can ultimately save your household hundreds of dollars in reduced cooling costs, yet still admit some winter sunshine to reduce heating and lighting costs. Landscaping can save you money in summer or winter.

Summer
You may have noticed the coolness of parks and wooded areas compared to the temperature of nearby city streets. Shading and evapotranspiration (the process by which a plant actively moves and releases water vapor) from trees can reduce surrounding air temperatures as much as 9° F (5°C). Because cool air settles near the ground, air temperatures directly under trees can be as much as 25°F (14°C) cooler than air temperatures above nearby blacktop. Studies by the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory found summer daytime air temperatures to be 3°F to 6° F (2°C to 3°C) cooler in tree-shaded neighborhoods than in treeless areas. A well-planned landscape can reduce an unshaded home’s summer air-conditioning costs by 15% to 50%. One Pennsylvania study reported air-conditioning savings of as much as 75% for small mobile homes.

Florida Neighborhoods: Connecting Our Yards to Florida’s Water

Our yards and neighborhoods are channels to our waterways. Your yard is the fi rst line of defense for preserving Florida’s fragile environment. The health of Florida’s estuaries, rivers, lakes, springs and aquifers depends partly on how you landscape and maintain your yard. You don’t even have to live on the water to make a big difference. Rain that falls on yards, roads and parking lots can wash into waterways or leach into ground water, carrying pollutants — including fertilizers, pesticides, animal waste, soil and petroleum products. Improperly applied fertilizers and pesticides from residential areas pose a serious threat to the health of Florida’s waters.

Creating Your Florida-Friendly Yard
A Florida-Friendly Yard doesn’t merely offer good-looking landscapes; it also becomes an asset to the environment, protecting natural resources and preserving the state’s unique beauty. Recognizing that the home landscape is part of a larger natural system will help in creating a Florida-Friendly Yard. Designing an aesthetically pleasing Florida-Friendly Yard begins with good decisions based on what you and your landscape require:

The Technologies

The third common use of the term Semantic Web is to identify a set of technologies, tools and standards which form the basic building blocks of a system that could support the vision of a Web imbued with meaning. The Semantic Web has been developing a layered architecture, which is often represented using a diagram first proposed by Tim Berners-Lee, with many variations since. Figure 1 gives a typical representation of this diagram.

• While necessarily a simplification which has to be used with some caution, it nevertheless gives a reasonable conceptualisation of the various components of the Semantic Web. We describe briefly these layers.
• Unicode and URI: Unicode, the standard for computer character representation, and URIs, the standard for identifying and locating resources (such as pages on the Web), provide a baseline for representing characters used in most of the languages in the world, and for identifying resources.

The Semantic Web has lived its infancy as a clearly delineated body of Web documents. That is, by and large researchers working on aspects of the Semantic Web knew where the appropriate ontologies resided and tracked them using explicit URLs. When the desired Semantic Web document was not at hand, one was more likely to use a telephone to find it than a search engine. This closed world assumption was natural when a handful of researchers were developing DAML 0.5 ontologies, but is untenable if the Semantic Web is to live up to its name. Yet simple support for search over Semantic Web documents, while valuable, represents only a small piece of the benefits that will accrue if search and inference are considered together. We believe that Semantic Web inference can improve traditional text search, and that text search can be used to facilitate or augment Semantic Web inference. Several difficulties, listed below, stand in the way of this vision.

THE SEMANTIC WEB

In the current Web, Web pages are intended for human consumption. The content is encoded in HTML which provides manly formatting information and makes it difficult for machines to access the semantics of the content. Natural language processing would be needed to do so. To overcome this limitation the SemanticWeb aims to make theWeb’s content machine-processable. Tim Berners-Lee et al. define the Semantic Web as an extension of the Web, in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation [2].

Since the Semantic Web provides machine-processable information based on a formal semantics, data can be shared and reused across application, enterprise, and community boundaries [11]. Therefore, two applications that support the same ontology are able to exchange data even if they were not meant to interoperate in the first place.