A Romanian engineer from Berlin has created a map which lists recurring family names in Romania and shows in what regions of the country some names are more popular. Florin Lipan, who works with Axonic Informationssysteme in Berlin, created the site called nume.ottomotor.ro, which has already indexed 2.7 million names.

The site includes 130,000 different family names in 3,800 localities. The platform is also available in English here.

For the name Popescu, one of the most popular family names in Romania, the map finds over 6,400 indexed families, with Bucharest being the most popular area. For the name Olareanu, Bucharest is again the hub, with a smaller number of families in Vrancea county, but in total only 13. Check out the map here.

How was the project created? The names index has been generated by crawling and parsing an online phone book using a couple of scripts written in PHP5.3. The app has been developed using Ruby on Rails 3 + HAML + CoffeeScript + Google Maps API v3 and deployed over Capistrano + Git, Florin Lipan explains.

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