As you can see, we store the metadata object in &metadata and use it in both the man and alien objects. Note that we are using << as the key to tell YAML to import the object and that there is a space between <<: and *metadata Now, suppose man traveled to another galaxy and you wanted to update the galaxy key for man alone, you will just add a new galaxy key under the import to tell YAML to override the value. Thus your man object will look like this