OSM has its roots in the UK and Germany, in the UK highways are classified A, B, I think even C and other very minor roads were labelled unclassified by Ordnance Survey historically so that is where the term comes from. The UK Ordnance Survey was historically important in creating everyday maps.
By using a standardised set of tags for highways it makes the rendering systems life easier. OSMand for example is used everywhere in the world and if it had to know about a different set of tags for each country the software would be much more complicated. If you’re mapping in OSM of course there is nothing to stop you tagging highways in any manner you like. The only problem is that the features will not be rendered by the normal systems. If you’re mapping in a HOT project then you’re expected to follow the HOT guidelines for tagging. ie building=yes etc. The problem here is the instructions for a group of projects only contain a subset of the highway types used for mapping in Africa as defined by the African Highway Wiki and the examples shown are all urban areas so the instructions although correct are incomplete as the project covers both urban and rural areas. Cheerio John
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