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.