We have installed our travel AI engine Ingeenee in Romania. The result is a Curious Romania. You can jump to https://curiosio.com/country/?iso=ro right away though we recommend to continue reading to learn and feel how to travel in Romania to feed your curiosity the smart way.
We made Curious Romania now as a gratitude for Romanian help to Ukraine. Rashists destroyed Ukrainian seaports and river ports in the Black Sea and on the Danube with never-ending cruise missiles and Shahed drones. Despite historical and environmental disputes, Bucharest supports Kyiv. Ukraine’s reliance on Romanian transit routes for exports is vital for the economy. “Most redirected Ukrainian exports now transit the Sulina Channel, the Romanian port of Constanta on the Black Sea or the adapted Romanian railway segment at the Galati port.” (GIS) Romania will host the Ukrainian F-16 pilot training programme. (DIGI24)
Roma, Romani, Romania
The first thing that will strike you re Romania is the naming. Naming things never was easy. The entire human history is full of naming-related problems and confusion, with political conflicts and wars. Naming things is of paramount importance in software and data design. Word matters.
Romania aka România comes from the Romanian Român, which is a derivative of the Latin adjective Romanus i.e. Roman. The etymology of România didn’t follow the Romanian pattern of word formation for country names, which usually adds the suffix -ia to the ethnonym by keeping its accent, like in Grec → Grecia, Bulgar → Bulgaria. The word România has an older history, coming from românie which in turn resulted as a derivation of the word român by adding the suffix -ie. (Wikipedia)
Rome aka Roma is the capital city of Italy and the Lazio region. The former capital of the Roman Kingdom, Roman Republic, Roman Empire, and the Western Roman Empire later. Transylvania is present in the illustrated itinerarium Tabula Peutingeriana. Go find out Napoca in it.
Curious travelers will find cool information about the Ancient Rome road network in All Roads Lead to Rome story. We wrote it. That story inspired even us so much that we created the artwork for the Curiosio landing page.
Romani aka Roma, Romany are an ethnic group of Indo-Aryans who traditionally lived a nomadic, itinerant lifestyle. Linguistic and genetic evidence suggests that the Romani originated in the Indian subcontinent, in particular the region of present-day Rajasthan. (Wikipedia)
It’s unclear what the world population is, the estimates differ by an order of magnitude. There is evidence of significant Romani presence in Romania but there is no link between the names. You definitely must visit Romania to figure all that out yourself. Curiosio will help you plan and take a great trip. Well, enough of digging into the origins of things, the rest of the story is solely about Romania.
There are only two hard problems in computer science: cache invalidation and naming things. —
Phil Karlton
Knowledge Graph
The travel AI engine Ingeenee is that thing that does the job so that you can follow your curiosity. Ingeenee is working on top of the Knowledge Graph aka KG. We grow our own KG to build an honest unbiased topology of the travel data. The KG for each country consists of the interlinked entities of points and places with their features and attributes.
There is a lot to experience in Romania. There are 9 World Heritage Sites by UNESCO and 16 on the tentative list. In the Romanian Knowledge Graph, we got ~3,200 points and ~21,000 places. There are ~2,600 small towns and villages and ~1600 parks. In comparison to the previously released Curious Denmark, it doesn’t look that much. The area of Romania is 5x bigger than Denmark, so why the lower density of points and places?
Let’s have a look at the OSM Node Density to qualitatively compare Romania vs. Denmark and other European countries that are already present in Curiosio. White color represents the highest density, light yellow is high density, dark yellow is dense, orange is sparse, black is empty. The density of OpenStreetMap nodes in Romania is indeed not the highest. So everything is good with the statistics.
Romanian Signature Trips
To ensure the Knowledge Graph is good we tested and validated various travel scenarios and use cases. The mainstream test is to take some travelog or vlog and try to recreate the itinerary in Curiosio. If all mentioned points and places are available in Curiosio then the KG is good. Below are several signature trips created during this testing.
Top Gear Special
“On the hunt for the fabled ‘best driving road in the world’ James May has his second bit of bad luck of the day. Forced to bunk down in their cars for the night Jeremy offers the boys some bizarre drinks to help them sleep. Finally, the Transfăgărășan Highway comes into view and Jeremy’s Aston Martin DBS Volante, Richard’s Ferrari California and James’ Lamborghini Gallardo LP560–4 Spyder proceed with joy.” (Top Gear)
They started in Constanța at the Black Sea and went into the Făgăraș Mountains for the Transfăgărășan iconic drive. Here is a 5-day road trip for two travelers, make sure you are renting a good car:
You can augment the number of travelers, trip duration, budget — hit the red [Supertrip] button and start editing the form to your requirements.
Seven Natural Wonders
There is an interesting list of the Seven Natural Wonders of Romania. We mapped them out and got a skeleton. Filled the segments between them with other cool points and places and got this rich itinerary:
Though this route bypasses the beautifully painted churches of Moldavia and the capital city of Bucharest, it’s probably the best route to explore Romania by car.
Transylvania Triangle
Originally, it was a 12-day self-guided train tour of the main attractions of Transylvania. We turned it into a juicier motoring adventure. Twelve days gives you enough time to see all of the main points and places while being short enough for those who don’t have the time for more in-depth travel. (Wikivoyage)
Being a triangular route, nearly all of Transylvania’s main sights are covered. Some people wish to start the tour in Bucharest, Romania’s capital, which is not in Transylvania but is the main Romanian entry point. To set the starting/finishing point to Bucharest — hit the red [Supertrip] button, move Brașov to waypoints, and set Bucharest instead of it as a starting point. The form must look like this:
What’s Next
The next country is going to be Bulgaria. Then Czechia or maybe the Baltics. Most probably Baltic trio will be later when we implement multi-country trips. A face-lift is possible soon. Some enhancements to Ingeenee could follow. Stay tuned, help Ukrainians defeat Rashism, and always follow your curiosity.
