In this paper we describe an original architecture for building and deploying physical hypermedia applications, i.e. those applications in which digital and real world objects are linked together using the well-known navigational metaphor of the World Wide Web. We also explain how our architecture evolved from a substrate for implementing location-based services to a powerful and open basis for supporting different navigation semantics and for building travel assistance services according to the current user’s context. After motivating our research and describing the architecture, we illustrate our ideas with some simple examples and compare our research with other related work in the subject.