there is a phrase in the lshw manpage that says -short is "very  much  like the output of HP-UX's ioscan.'

A websearch for 'HP-UX's ioscan' brings up it's man page which states:

hw path A numerical string of hardware components, notated
sequentially from the bus address to the device
address. Typically, the initial number is
appended by slash (/), to represent a bus
converter (if required by your machine), and
subsequent numbers are separated by periods (.).
Each number represents the location of a hardware
component on the path to the device.