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.
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.