In the next several months, we'll be rolling out several widgets that take full advantage of CARMA's Application Programming Interface.

The CARMA website, especially with the Dig Deeper tool, allows the user to sift through vast amounts of cleanly presented CO2 emissions data like never before. Plants, companies and locations can be filtered by numerous criteria, including but not limited to: future power output, present CO2 emissions, past intensity and parent location. Maps present an intuitive display to compliment the raw data.

With all this information in the CARMA database, there's no wonder that some connections were left untouched. We just couldn't add too much information to the website without it getting overwhelming for the casual visitor. If you have unanswered questions after viewing the CARMA site, then the chances are that the API might be worth looking in to.

With the CARMA API, you can create a widget to simply repackage CARMA data. Examples include:
1. Displaying the future emissions of planned power plants by location.
2. Displaying trends in emissions and carbon intensity for specific plants, companies, or geographic regions.
3. Looking up the carbon intensity of power providers by zip code in the U.S.

You can also mashup data from CARMA and other sources:
1. Using the carbon intensity of individual power companies to calculate accurate carbon footprints for individual users.
2. Mashing up CARMA’s emissions data with campaign contribution data for congressional districts.
3. Mashing up CARMA’s power company emissions data with financial information.

Remember that a lot of the plants have coordinates, so creating visually-appealing map widgets (perhaps mashing up with other types of geographic data, like asthma rates) is entirely possible.

A widget is a little chunk of code that people can call their own and place on their blog or website. For example, this widget simply grabs the latest RSS feeds from somewhere. Some other widgets are more interactive, such as for weather, allowing users to enter some inputs (in this case, their zip code).

Calling the API is relatively simple, and it returns data back in XML format. Let's say that you wanted to get the raw data for the state of California. You can simply browse to http://carma.org/api/1.0/searchLocations?name=California. To build a widget, you could make multiple API calls and even mash it up with external data sources (like Yahoo! finance).

We created the API so anyone can download the raw data and use it to form their own connections. Forum One will be creating several widgets to showcase the great potential of the API, but the real excitement comes from how you interpret and display the data.