Who holds this map together?

SICK AG makes sensors, the kind a robot uses to see a pallet or a person. On our map it has 173 ties, and each line means one exact thing: a company states on its website that it partners with SICK, two organisations share a European project, a paper carries both names. The kinds are labelled on the drawing. Read a chain of lines with care. A path from a French startup to SICK to a German university is two records; it is not money, knowledge or parts moving along it. We keep that in mind for everything that follows.

Take two organisations on the map and find the shortest route between them. Do that for every pair, and count how often the route passes through one dot: that share is its betweenness. SICK’s is the highest on the map, 12% of shortest routes between two other organisations. A high share does not mean the dot is indispensable. The shortest route can pass through SICK while a longer one goes round; betweenness counts the shortest and ignores the rest. To know whether anyone actually depends on a dot, you have to take it out.

Erase SICK’s dot, keep every other dot and line, and count the pairs of organisations that could reach each other before and cannot now: 503,559, 3.0% of the 16,634,713 pairs the map connected. Erase the European Commission instead, whose betweenness is nearly as high, and only 23,057 pairs lose their path, 0.1%. Erase one organisation at random and 6,626 do on average. Same measure, similar score, very different consequence. SICK sits on routes the map has no other way around; the Commission sits on routes that also run elsewhere, because a funder tied to a thousand recipients is one dot on many parallel paths.

A high shortest-path score and an irreplaceable connection are two different properties, and the map shows both. That is the whole finding, and it is a finding about our record: the routes through SICK are the shared projects we collected and the trade shows where it was listed beside others, drawn under the map’s two rules. It says nothing about whether a factory would stop without SICK’s sensors. Change what we collect, or lift the rules that cut the map, and the routes change; the data page runs a removal test of its own. To see how the rules shape the graph, read the story beside this one.