Most efficient method to get national-level data displayed with Leaflet

Question

I'm looking for the most efficient way to get a national or U.S. and Canada level dataset working with a JS mapping library. My problem is there's a myriad of technologies that seem like they can work. I'm just not sure if they do or which of them is best.

My use case: my company does monthly crime mapping for several large clients and they use the data to understand risk around their businesses. The dataset itself is not at all large. We're talking maybe 800-1000 points among the U.S. and Canada but it is proprietary and sensitive and for that reason I'm hesitant to use geoJSON. Given they are using it to understand risk around a location, they need to be able to see a certain level of zoom - which is why MBTiles/TileMill kind of falls short. I'm looking to do zoom levels 0-12 or 0-14. That generates a 10GB tile file. I can split up the tiles into like two or more portions, but I'm customizing maps for several companies and that seems like it would create a bunch of additional steps. Additionally, I'm looking for the points to have teasers/tooltips so they need to be modifiable.

So in summary I need -

• A decent amount of zoom (thinking 0-12 or 0-14 level) for about 1,000 points, which should have tooltips/teasers, dispersed among the United States and Canada. The data is proprietary and thus it should be in a secured format.

I'm looking for suggestions on what technologies can help me do this. I accept there's going to be a cost, but I want to avoid anything too expensive (> $10k).

Answer 1

disclaimer: i work for esri and help maintain esri leaflet.

opinion: it would also be extremely straightforward and cost effective to use ArcGIS Online to publish the points in a queryable, but not editable hosted feature service and use our leaflet plugins to authenticate and display the data.

http://esri.github.io/esri-leaflet/examples/simple-feature-layer.html https://developers.arcgis.com/en/features/cloud-storage/ http://esri.github.io/esri-leaflet/examples/arcgis-online-auth.html

our online tools allow you to generate services from raw schema and upload flat shapefiles or tables with lat/long defined or addresses to geocode.

more info on pricing can be found here: https://developers.arcgis.com/en/plans/

Answer 2

If you are looking to limit exposure of raw data the best solution would be to use something as general as geoserver with tilecache.

This would be highly performant, only as costly as your time, and would provide the end users with far less useful(theft wise) data, as they would have to do image analysis.

You could have the server up on AWS with your data in, and serving tiles to a leaflet map in a matter of hours(2).

You would also just use the access control you already have in your platform to manage map access.

This implementation is overkill in a performance sense, but is great for your proprietary concerns.