  The structure of an XML document can be optionally specified by means of XML
Schema, thus enabling the exploitation of structural information for efficient
document handling. Upon schema evolution, or when exchanging documents among
different collections exploiting related but not identical schemas, the need
may arise of adapting a document, known to be valid for a given schema S, to a
target schema S'. The adaptation may require knowledge of the element semantics
and cannot always be automatically derived. In this paper, we present an
automata-based method for the static analysis of user-defined XML document
adaptations, expressed as sequences of XQuery Update update primitives. The key
feature of the method is the use of an automatic inference method for
extracting the type, expressed as a Hedge Automaton, of a sequence of document
updates. The type is computed starting from the original schema S and from
rewriting rules that formally define the operational semantics of a sequence of
document updates. Type inclusion can then be used as conformance test w.r.t.
the type extracted from the target schema S'.
