Setup (one time) for building

Do the normal one-time-setup if you haven't already done this.
Set up your maven "settings.xml" file (located in the directory containing your local repository; in windows, this is in c:Documents and Settings\\.m2. Here's a sample:
<settings xmlns="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0"
  xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
  xsi:schemaLocation="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0
                      http://maven.apache.org/xsd/settings-1.0.0.xsd">

  <profiles>
    <profile>
      <id>staged-release</id>
      <repositories>
        <repository>
          <id>staged-release</id>
          <url>https://repository.apache.org/content/repositories/orgapacheuima-042/</url>
        </repository>
      </repositories>
    </profile>
  </profiles>

</settings>
Note: The url element above is just a sample; each release will have its own unique staging repository name.

Testing the parent-pom-top build

Check out the build directory:
svn checkout http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/uima/build/trunk some-checkout-local-dir
Checkout something to build (to verify that the parent-pom-top works:
svn checkout http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/uima/uimaj/trunk  some-checkout-local-dir
If you want, using m2Eclipse, import existing projects as maven projects, and select the build directories, and import the build projects. Repeat for the uimaj projects.

Using your favorite find/replace tools, find all instances of where the parent-pom-top is used which specifies a version of 1-SNAPSHOT, and change those to just 1 (that's what is being tested).
Build the build tooling:
  cd to the build checkout dir / parent-poms
  mvn -Pstaged-release install
  
  cd to uimaj checkout dir / aggregate-uimaj
  mvn -Pstaged-release install 
Afterwards, go to your local repo and remove the org/apache/uima/parent-pom-top/1 directory, to prevent it from accidentally being used, until it passes official release, unless this component is needed (depended upon) by further artifacts in the group being released.