I am updating infrastructure layers in QGIS for a small municipality.
Everything is open source and there is no budget for buying new data.
I need to update the ROADS layer - as the one in the original database is well... absolutely terrible. Rather than fixing every feature to become workable with I want to just re-create the whole layer by digitizing in roads from a Basemap. My problem is that all of the basemaps used from the OpenLayers plugin seem to be out of date. I also tried using some WMS maps from StatsCanada (Its Canadian Data) and there are some roads missing. The most accurate/updated data I am able to find is from maps.google.ca. I could do it the long/hard way by clicking on each point on google maps saying "whats here" to get the coordinates, then start a line feature at that point.. but that is a lot of going back and forth between my browser and my GIS program.
I was wondering if anyone has tried to take google maps (from maps.google) and use it as a basemap in QGIS - getting what you see on their main website not some old cached version from openlayers. OR if there is a better way to do this? (I thought about using a mapserver and digitize a KML layer on there then convert it to a shapefile and import into QGIS but that seems like a lot of extra steps as well..)