Insect intelligent building (I 2 B) is a novel decentralized, flat-structured intelligent building platform with excellent flexibility and scalability. I 2 B allows users to develop applications that include control strategies for efficiently managing and controlling buildings. However, developing I 2 B APPs (applications) is considered a challenging and complex task due to the complex structural features and parallel computing models of the I 2 B platform. Existing studies have been shown to encounter difficulty in supporting a high degree of abstraction and in allowing users to define control scenarios in a concise and comprehensible way. This paper aims to facilitate the development of such applications and to reduce the programming difficulty. We propose Touch, a textual domain-specific language (DSL) that provides a high-level abstraction of I 2 B APPs. Specifically, we first establish the conceptual programming architecture of the I 2 B APP, making the application more intuitive by abstracting different levels of physical entities in I 2 B. Then, we present special language elements to effectively support the parallel computing model of the I 2 B platform and provide a formal definition of the concrete Touch syntax. We also implement supporting tools for Touch, including a development environment as well as target code generation. Finally, we present experimental results to demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of Touch.