Character Breakdown
His family (last) name, Akiyama. The first character is "autumn" and the second is "mountain".
His given (first) name, Ryo. Character means "distant".
Another way of writing his given name in Japanese kana. (The previous are in kanji.)
Ryo or Ryou?
Some romanize his name as Ryou, others as Ryo -- which way is correct? I believe Ryou is the proper romanization of his name when written in kana. I'm not sure about the kanji. However, Ryo is what's written across the boy's backpack in the Anode/Cathode games and on the Best Tamers CD. 'Ryo' is also used in the Tag Tamers commercial, so that seems to be the path Toei and Bandai are taking.
Translations
Well you already know what the literal translation of his name means, now how do the online translators translate his name?
Most don't seem to have a problem with Akiyama, although dictionaries will break it up into separate characters because they don't recognize names.
Ryo is a different story. Many will translate the kana to Ryou and the kanji to Liao. Babelfish (the AltaVista translator) has a mind of it's own. While the kanji is also translated to Liao, the kana is translated to "water caltrop".
As for why, Ryo is named as he is, one can speculate. Often in Japan children are named in order of birth, names that uses aesthetically pleasing characters, or names that uses characters of a family member. Most of the Digimon character have names fitting their personality, at least in the kanji characters (ie: Hikari is 'little light', Mimi is 'beautiful').
A Boy By Any Other Name
Digimon's been translated into other languages and sometimes the names are translated as well. If you happen to know if Ryo has a different name in another dub, please let me know.
The Chinese dub sticks with what they've been doing before with the previous series, that is taking the names written in kanji and using the cantonese pronunciation: Chau Saan Liu (Qiu Shan Liao). I can't romanize Chinese to save my life so the romanization is from the dictionary at mandarintools.com.