Want to win an iPad 2? Help ArtFinder in its Facebook image-tagging game.

The Next Web has teamed up with ArtFinder to offer our readers the chance to win an iPad 2. Read on to find out how.

ArtFinder is a new way of discovering, experiencing and sharing art. The founders have been working with galleries and museums to build a central database of artworks, and it estimates that it now has half a million pieces, covering nearly every collection from many of the major institutions.

ArtFinder allows you to build your own art profile, receive personalized recommendations based on the art you like, and share and discuss art with friends across the social sphere. And ArtFinder is even partnering with galleries to produce dedicated apps that let users take pictures of any painting in an exhibition and discover more information about it.

The startup has already received high-praise for its work in bringing art online and to the masses. Some of it is already categorized with tags, but much of it isn’t. And where there are tags, they are quite specific and don’t fit into a larger semantic structure, which is something ArtFinder is striving to fix.

Its ultimate goal is to improve the art search facility, recommendations, and enable it do exciting things such as graphing the depictions of horses in European and Arabian art over thousands of years.

With that in mind, ArtFinder has developed a crowdsourced tagging game for Facebook called Carataggio, which is designed to get everyone on board to help tag its database of art. It’s essentially a set of boxes with high-level categories such as people or animals, and a random collection of playing card-sized images. The cards are then sorted into the boxes that best describes each image. When it has enough sorted for each category, users will then get a hand of people cards to sort into groups such as men, women or children.

Users’ scores are posted to a league table, and to Facebook, which adds a game aspect to it and lets people compete with their friends to see who can tag the most.

So how can you get involved? Simply visit Carataggio, and sign-in using your Facebook credentials:

Once you’ve connected, you’ll be presented with a full-screen, containing boxes with categories such as People, Scapes, Animals or Plants, Inanimate Objects and Abstract:

You then simply drag-and-drop the art into the box to which you think it best fits:

How to win an iPad 2

So what about the chance to win an iPad 2? Well, everyone who clicks through to the Carataggio site from this TNW blog post, and then participates in the tagging, will be in with a chance of winning.

The competition will run for two weeks from today, closing on 23rd of August at 11:59pm (BST). Those who manage a score in the top 10% will be entered into the draw, selected at random and then notified via Facebook. Only one entry per person will be allowed.

Good luck!

Update:

This competition is now over, and Carataggio has now chosen a winner. Read all about it here.