One GIS user/developer I spoke with mentioned a project they had: Find best place in town to build a mall. This included information such as land elevation, fl

One GIS user/developer I spoke with mentioned a project they had: Find best place in town to build a mall. This included information such as land elevation, floods areas, soil types, distances to roads and their importance (highway, major motorway, how many lanes), distance to facilities (electricity / gas / water / sewer), population demographics (wealth, buses) etc. So beyond just measuring distances and polygon coverage, your GIS will have a lot of layers of data. Each layer either representing different data in itself, or just more detail. The query then is to find best matches knowing data, criteria, and rankings.