Rules of thumb for the applicationConfigs:

• (1) applicationConfigs which are not likely to be changed in production are on the classpath
• (2) applicationConfigs which are likely to be changed in production are in the WEB-INF

In the web.xml there is referred to as

• (1) classpath:/applicationContext-persistence.xml
• (2) /WEB-INF/applicationContext.xml

As a result of this, the dao are configured according (1): /geonetwork-persistence-ebrim/src/main/resources/applicationContext-persistence.xml

I did this to avoid a lot of duplicate application configs in the test and WEB-INF directories.