Abstract
Most hypermedia systems have been developed as a unique and self-contained application preventing information interchange and code reusability between applications. To address this problem, a generic layered architecture for hypermedia systems with four major interfaces is first introduced. The architecture adequately uses the MHEG proposal to provide the desired independence between hypermedia applications' conceptual models and storage strategies for hypermedia objects. Then, some design problems of the topmost layer, using as example the nested context hypermedia model, are discussed. Finally, motivated by the fact that a distributed environment may be necessary to meet the real time requirements of hypermedia applications, some issues concerning the design of a distributed system based on the proposed architecture are briefly addressed.