Terminology is important in order to achieve an effective e-government. This paper describes an initiative by the Swedish Institute for Standards, SIS, aiming to achieve a homogeneous national terminology for metadata in the Swedish Spatial Data Infrastructure, SDI. The initiative consists of two parts; First, establishing a translation of the English language metadata elements in the international and Swedish standard for metadata for geographic information. Second, to create a national application, i.e. profile, of the standard which even is in accordance with the requirements of metadata for geographic data listed in the European Union´s INSPIRE directive and additional national needs. The translation of metadata terms from English to Swedish together with the publication of a national metadata guideline for the Swedish SDI is an example showing the importance of a national domain specific terminology, such a for metadata describing geographic information to be used in a spatial data infrastructure as part of the development of e-government and electronic information interchange.