[GeoNetwork-users] "Duplicate" metadata, Datasets and Series

Hi list, I'm looking for some advice/comments on how to deal with
"duplicate" metadata between datasets and series.

I've to deal with more and more datasets and sometimes metadata are more
or less the same between datasets (ie. only title, point of contact and
bbox are different). These metadata are edited by different
organisations and sometimes in different catalogues.

It looks like we could set up control on the metadata editing / search
tools between a "master" metadata and childs metadata in order to have
easy editing for user but it seems quite difficult and complex to do so
: some sections in read-only, some sections not ...

Maybe a more generic approach could be to use relationship between
series and datasets as defined in ISO and then set up a MD_Metadata
composed of a series which has 0..n MD_Metadata :
gmd:series/gmd:DS_Series/gmd:composedOf/gmd:DS_DataSet/gmd:has/gmd:MD_Metadata

Then could we described the dataset completely in the DS_Series element
or having a gmd:MD_Metadata element pointing to another metadata using
the uuid attribute ? This uuid could be in the local node or even in
another remote node. Then how to resolve uuid ? Use of xlink:href could
be better ...

Anybody using such mechanism ? Comments are welcomed.
Thanks.

Francois