I have tried to separate each of the components by concern. We have the
following:

maven-model:

This is strictly the model for Maven, so really just plain beans. Eventually
I would like to be able to generate these from a UML model but that can
come later. In addition to generating the sources from a UML model I would
like to generate the XSD or any other artifacts that may be required. This way
we can keep things up-to-date instead of the disaster we have with the
current incarnation of Maven.

maven-model-tools:

There are two components in here. A model marshaller and unmarshaller. These
components simply do the mapping there are no notions of interpolation or
inheritance in these components.

maven-project:

The maven Project is really the runtime entity that people are used to
working with. The Project is created with a component called the
ProjectBuilder which is responsible for creating a Project which does carry
with it the notions of inheritance and interpolation. The Project contains a
copy of the model and a copy of the interpolated model. I did this because
the contents of the model cannot be contaminated with runtime notions. For
example you don't want interpolated values finding their way into the model
because when you write it to disk again you've obviously lost the real
values. The same goes with inherited values i.e. you do not want to write
back to disk the dependencies inherited from a parent project as that's
implicit using the <extend> element.

The project also carries any runtime notions like artifacts (Michal this is
where your artifact tools will come in, the ProjectBuilder will use the
artifact component to create the list of artifacts), dependency maps, source
roots created by generative processes. Currrently in maven all those notions
are baked into the project and it's created a horrible mess.

maven:

This is the actual maven thingy itself. Currently is very small but the
central notion is that a goal is a mapping to a method in a component. You
can also hand off parameters too. I am using OGNL to bind goals to bits to
execute in components. There is a simple test that displays the mapping. I
will incorporate Werkz in here to handle everything.