I recently noticed that there is already a description for historic=city_gate in the wiki:
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:historic%3Dcity_gate Current description reads: "A city gate (or town gate) is a gate within a city wall." which is not bad, but should IMHO be amended. City gates are often objects that continue to exist also when the wall has been demolished, be it physically or in a more abstract form (very often there are place names refering to city gates, they are often recognizable in the city structure/layout even when partly or completely demolished). There is also a wikipedia link from the above page that has a better definition of it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_gate (because refers also to situations with removed walls). I would like to extend the city gate definition also to spots where there is no actual gate anymore. Recently I stumbled upon these. In one example there is no gate any more, but some remains of the walls are still present (as base for later built buildings atop of them), there is still a street there which enters into the old town and the local people still refer to the place with the name "foo gate". My suggestion is to use historic=city_gate on all places where there is or was a city gate (possibly together with "name" and additional information like WP links, historic:civilization, etc.), and to add additional tags for situations with actually in place gates or structures. If there is a gate that is closed I'd use barrier=city_gate and building=city_gate, if there is only an arch (empty opening) but no gate I'd add building=city_gate but no barrier tag (dependent on the situation and prior mapping you might also add barrier=entrance in some situations). On the above page there is also the suggestion to tag these as barrier=sally_port which is so poorly defined in OSM and wikipedia that I am not sure what the actual meaning in OSM is (mainly because there seems to be a problem with the interlanguage links: the German version of sally port describes a lateral gate used for attacks in times of siege (de:Ausfalltor) while the English version seems to describe a security lock (not the small one with keys but a system of rooms used to controll access) (de:Sicherheitsschleuse)). The German version is refering to what is described in the English section of "Etymology and historical usage". IMHO there is no benefit in tagging these 2 different features with the same tag, just because in English language there is these 2 usage applications in different contexts. What do you think? Can we clarifiy the two tags? cheers, Martin _______________________________________________ Tagging mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/tagging
