The flow of electrones in the cables in the ground is altered due to electromagnetic interaction with metal that moves above them. These variantions in the flow are interpreted by sensors and first transformed in electromagnetic signals that are explicitly data. These signals are then investigated by a computer that runs the SIRIUS algorithm to detect, what kind of metalic thing passed by. In this step the data is juxtaposed to big datasets in order to lable it. The computer then sends its interpretation that now is put into the form of encoded text to the eco counter servers and ads metadata like place and date to it. At this point, the data is already once completely reconfigured and includes not anymore the information it had in the beginning bit only the interpretation of the algorithm. In the steps that follow, the data is reduced more and more. On the city's internal dashboard, the kind of vehicle that passed might be still visible, on the public dashboard however, every measurement is reduced to a 1 with a timestamp. While in the beginning very complex sensor data existed, in the end, the data is stripped in the way that it only shows that another bike was measured.
For the traffic model, the data is then historisized and combined with many other datasets in order to provide new meaning.
One might analyze the data journey even more fine-grained when attending to more technical processing that mostly remains hidden. However, I'll stick with those sites that I found represented in the material and was able to imagine, which is still quite a lot!
Site 1: The cables
Site 2: The sensors
Site 3: The computer under the road
Site 4: The mobile radio towers and transfer servers
Site 5: Eco Counter Servers
Site 6: The dashboard view at the workplaces of city employees
Site 7: The servers that host the public dashboard
Site 8: Computers of website visitors
Site 9: The excel-sheets that constitute the data hub
In future: Site 10: Places in which the traffic model is later used?
Site 5: