Origin
NamSor Origin API will guess the likely country of origin of a personal name, based on the sociolinguistics of the name (language, culture). This is a coarse grain API, typically for marketing or social analytics.
The method for anthroponomical classification can be summarized as follow: judging from the name only and the publicly available list of all ~150k Olympic athletes since 1896 (and other similar lists of names), for which national team would the person most likely run? Here, the United-States are typically considered as a melting pot of other ‘cultural origins’: Ireland, Germany, etc. and not as a onomastic class on its own.
TIP: Make a diverse and representative data sample first and try the API on a small data set before running a larger data mining.
Get the SDK and join the open discussion on GitHub
https://github.com/namsor/namsor-api
[Beta] version 0.18.2 (released on 2014-11-24 10:59:03 UTC)
Release note: NamSor Origin SDK v0.18.2 is out.