Thanks for the link to the research paper, it's a good read. Are you aware of any event sourcing frameworks/datastores that use one (or more) of these strategies to tackle the problem of schema evolution?
Here's the section of their manual related to this. http://www.axonframework.org/docs/2.4/repositories-and-event...
Akka Persistence is the other JVM ES framework that I'm familiar with. it supports upcasting as well.
http://doc.akka.io/docs/akka/2.4/java/persistence-schema-evo...