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I would like to get advice from you about one thing. I would like to develop my own web GIS application. It would be about some sport places in my hometown; it would be good practice for my education - I'm still a student. First, I need to get coordinates of the features, then I think to put it in AutoCad, then export to .shp file, then work with it in QGIS and use Postgres and PostGis for databases and than use Mapserver and so on.

But I need help with the first step, getting the coordinates. I don't have any high accurate instrument like some good GPS, so is there any chance to get coordinates of the places by Google Earth? How accurate is that and is it even possible to do it like that? I'm looking forward to someone's answer and please don't get mad if I said something stupid because as I said, I'm in the beginning of getting to know all this GIS web development and things like that. Thanks!

Thank you all for your answers, it all helped me in some way. The only thing that I'm not sure is accuracy of osm and bing maps. I was editing some stuff in JOSM recently and I've realized that bing maps don't really fits in the right place if you compare it to gpx data. (there is at least 2m difference) I'm not still quite sure is it accurate enough for me. I would like to achieve 1m maximum level of accuracy.. :/

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Why do you want to put your data in AutoCAD? Why not just bring in some aerial imagery in QGIS and digitize based on that? What level of accuracy are you hoping to achieve? – Baltok Dec 17 '12 at 20:44
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Use OpenStreetMap (OSM) for the data source for your area of interest. download.geofabrik.de/openstreetmap you might have the Sports locations already mapped. If not you can add them. – Mapperz♦ Dec 17 '12 at 20:44
I don't think you are going to find 1 meter accuracy with online imagery or even imagery on your local computer. It is difficult to orthorectify imagery over a large area and still maintain accuracy like 1 m. I have seen orthorectified imagery over a small area with excellent accuracy, but that is a custom job. – Baltok Dec 18 '12 at 15:41

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If you can see the places you are interested in with Google earth you can see the coordinates of your mouse cursor in the information bar at the bottom of the window. In the image below my mouse was over the field in the upper middle portion and you can see the coordinates in teh lower right portion of the image. Image shows how coordinates are displayed in Google Earth

If you don't have an excessively large number of places to get coordinates from and they don't need to be extremely precise this will probably work well for you.

As for the rest, that's out of my skillset, hopefully this will get you started!

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If you have some Satellite data, you could digitize off it directly in Qgis. If you don't have any satellite data, you could look into adding either the OSM layers, or the Bing maps layers (using the OpenLayers Plugin) and digitize using that.

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