The present invention describes a method that is based on an analysis of document information, and which can be used for conducting and potentially accelerating business opportunity assessments and technology investment decisions. Documents include patent documents, scientific and trade literature, magazines, e-zines, Internet search results and the like. The system can be implemented as an automatic or semi-automatic analysis system, and it ultimately provides a document index or visual index from which technology, investment or business decisions can be drawn. The method comprises the steps of selecting a document data set for analysis, selecting one or more analysis means, such as means to determine relationships among the documents in the selected set, and then, forming a representation of the result for further analysis, display or planning.