Patent ID: 7636709

Claim:
A machine-implemented method to acquire related reports, comprising: receiving a user-selected first report and a user-defined numerical index value provided by the user in user-defined parameters; identifying one or more second reports and components of the one or more second reports that are associated with the first report, wherein the components are sub-reports; providing the one or more second reports and the components to a data mining application; and receiving one or more third reports from the data mining application, wherein the one or more third reports are related to the first report and precision and recall of the one or more third reports conform to the numerical index value, wherein the numerical index value instructs the data mining application on the precision of relatedness of the received one or more third reports to the first report and a number of one or more third reports recalled in relation to the first report, and wherein the third reports are derived from the one or more second reports and the components, and each of the reports and each of the components is acquired from a business report data store, and wherein the numeric index value includes a value from 0 to 100 and is assigned by a user, and as the numeric index value increases the precision increases and the recall decreases and as the numeric index value decreases the precision decreases and the recall increases.