A team of Dutch web-designers and digital engineers today launched Silk, their new and ambitious web-app which doubles as a flexible and interactive platform for displaying information-rich web-pages.

Rutger van Waveren, Silk's Partnerships Officer, describes it as being "Tumblr for data", an excellent metaphor for the way Silk simplifies the appearance of a data-rich page while cramming in a huge amount of detail to the visualisations themselves.

To show you exactly what we mean, we'll take you through a datablog web-page in Silk format. Below is a view of the page as you find it here. As you can see, our own visual styles remain unaltered.

The datablog's Silk site. Click here to see for yourself

Perhaps the most significant difference Silk provides is the increase in interactivity regarding tables, charts and other visualisations. While the map (above) may look very similar to those we produce on a regular basis, it is in fact quite different, chiefly in its capacity for customisation.

This first view shows asylum seekers by country of destination within Europe in 2011, but with a few clicks you can visualise an entirely different set of data on the same map, within the same Silk site.

Our data on asylum seekers in Europe, mapped in Silk's visualiser

On our Silk site, simply move your mouse cursor over the map, select "open widget in Silk explorer", and then choose the data you wish to visualise using the options to the left of the visualisation. The panel below shows a view of data for asylum seekers within North America in 2009, displayed on the same map.

Asylum seeker figures for North America in 2009

When comparing data over time, or between non-adjacent countries, maps tend not to be practical, so Silk allows you to switch to other visualisation formats within the same page. Here you can see asylum seeker totals for Japan and Denmark from 2009 to 2011.

More of our data on asylum seekers - this time for Japan and Denmark - shown as a Silk visualisation

Alternatively you may simply wish to show a table of figures. Below is a list of countries who received over 25,000 asylum seekers in 2011, ranked by total volume.

Table of countries with highest totals of asylum seekers in 2011, visualised in Silk

For the final two visualisation types available at this stage we will use the second of the two datasets we currently have on our Slik site. This data covers tuition fees, teaching scores, dropout rates and Guardian rankings for 108 universities across the world.

Below is a pie-chart showing the proportions of different university groups charging the maximum £9,000 tuition fee rate in 2012. As you can see, Russell group institutions account for almost a third of those charging the top-rate, despite containing only one fifth of the universities in the full dataset.

Our data on universities charging £9,000 in 2012, visualised in Silk

Customisable visualisations are just one part of what Silk offers, and another of its strengths is that any Silk site doubles as a data encyclopedia. Whenever we upload a new file to the datablog Silk site, you will be able to explore it in exactly the same detail demonstrated above.

The search bar at the top of any Silk site is another great feature. Type the name of any entity for which data is held in a particular site, and up pops an overview of every statistic associated with that query.

Search for "Oxford" on our site, for example, and having chosen one of the city's two institutions, you are greeted with a list of information including address, teaching score and dropout rate. Any of these figures that appears as an entry in a datablog spreadsheet is also shown on the top right of the page under the heading "facts on this page", and clicking "explore" next to a statistic will take you straight to a visualisation of its parent dataset.

Have a browse of our site and some of the others Silk feature on their homepage, and let us know what you think.

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