Este arquivo XML é nomeadoexample.xml:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<project 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/maven-v4_0_0.xsd">

  <modelVersion>14.0.0</modelVersion>
  <groupId>.com.foobar.flubber</groupId>
  <artifactId>uberportalconf</artifactId>
  <version>13-SNAPSHOT</version>
  <packaging>pom</packaging>
  <name>Environment for UberPortalConf</name>
  <description>This is the description</description>    
  <properties>
      <birduberportal.version>11</birduberportal.version>
      <promotiondevice.version>9</promotiondevice.version>
      <foobarportal.version>6</foobarportal.version>
      <eventuberdevice.version>2</eventuberdevice.version>
  </properties>
  <!-- A lot more here, but as it is irrelevant for the problem I have removed it -->
</project>

Se eu carregar example.xml e analisá-lo com ElementTree, posso ver que seu namespace éhttp://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0.

>>> from xml.etree import ElementTree
>>> tree = ElementTree.parse('example.xml')
>>> print tree.getroot()
<Element '{http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0}project' at 0x26ee0f0>

Não encontrei um método para chamar para obter apenas o namespace de umElement sem recorrer à análise dostr(an_element) de um elemento. Parece que tem que haver uma maneira melhor.