US Patent 7797188 Method and system for optimizing business location selection

A method and system for making predictions about business locations. The method includes providing a spatial map and analyzing heterogeneous data having a spatial component to find utilizable data. Relationships are automatically extracted from the utilizable data. The step of automatically extracting relationships includes generating a composite indicator, which correlates spatial data with unstructured data. The extracted relationships are presented on a spatial map to make a prediction about at least one business location. Preferably, the predictions are presented as a rank-ordered list on the spatial map and a heat map overlays the spatial map to indicate predictions about particular regions.