In order to assist bottom-up efforts by administrations annotating their Web resources with adequate metadata, we introduce and follow an activity-based approach towards development and use of ontologies for e-govern- ment services. Specifically, we analyze two scenarios related to e-government services through identifying goals and activities of administrations and their clients, on the basis of which we determine the need for sharing perspectives and (electronic) boundary objects. We claim that such an analysis narrows down development and use of metadata, lowers the barriers of ontology usage (for metadata production), and efficiently guides development of e-government ontologies towards the needs of citizens, businesses and administrations alike.