Updates on XML documents and schemas

In a dynamic and heterogeneous world as the Web, the need often arises to update XML data, as well as their structures, to adhere to new domain requirements. Updates may break compliance of data to schemas, and updates at schema level may in addition require to adapt associated documents to the new schema. Moreover, emerging application contexts in which updates come from different sources, such as collaborative editing, versioning, cloud computing, and disconnected execution, are more and more relevant. The main goals of this thesis are: (i) to support data and schema updates as an integrated process, investigating the mutual implications of updating either data or schema on the other, (ii) to develop a flexible framework for dynamically reasoning on XML updates, applicable in different contexts and (iii) to study provenance in the context of our XML update framework, introducing the possibility of storing and querying each individual update information to trace the data lineage.