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When Chats Split Apart: Formalizing Temporal Communication Fragmentation and the CARTA Reconstruction Framework

Formalizes what happens when a messaging account's history splits across two devices with no way to recombine them, and proposes CARTA, a reconstruction contract that quarantines and reports what it can't safely resolve.

Published November 2026 · International Journal of Management and Data Analytics (IJMADA)

The problem

Temporal Communication Fragmentation occurs when a messaging account’s history becomes irreconcilably split across two or more devices with no synchronization bridge. This isn’t just a sync bug. It’s a structural problem in systems where the ground truth of conversation state is distributed, and the devices can’t re-converge.

The framework

CARTA (Chat Archive Reconstruction & Temporal Access) formalizes what you can and cannot safely reconstruct in this scenario. Instead of guessing or silently dropping messages, CARTA defines a contract:

  • Identify what is unambiguously recoverable
  • Quarantine what has conflicting interpretations
  • Report both to the user with transparency about what was lost and why

The CHAMP-Pipeline is a zero-dependency reference implementation of this contract.

Current status

Published in the International Journal of Management and Data Analytics (IJMADA), Vol. 6, Issue 1, 2026, pp. 449–470, under a CC BY 4.0 licence. The manuscript is also archived on Zenodo, alongside CHAMP-Pipeline, its zero-dependency WhatsApp reference implementation. Evaluation is against a synthetic corpus with known ground truth, not a real archive. No real WhatsApp export has been reconstructed, and no accuracy figure is claimed.

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