The area of pervasive computing has gained a strong interest in various research topics. One of them is about providing tools to end-users or novice programmers, so that they can program their own applications on pervasive environments. We call pervasive environment a distributed environment that can be deployed in various real environments, like home, hospital, museums, or any building that aim at helping their users' everyday life. Many tools have been developed to ease the programming of such environments, overcoming more and more high-level issues, from networking to service discovery or coordination logic description. Though, these tools have some limits: they are either not accessible enough, or not expressive enough.

To circumvent these limits, our high-level language aims at easing the description of coordination logic between networked entities of distributed environments. Pantagruel allows to specify pervasive computing application in two steps: the developer first definine a pervasive computing environment by means of a taxonomy of entities and their instantiation, and second, he defines a coordination logic of the entities. Pantagruel brings a high-level layer intended to complement existing tools in the development of safe coordination logics, as well as to reduce the cognitive effort required by the programming nature of these tools.

Through Pantagruel, we develop an approach to define properly a rule-based scenario for a distributed environment: (1) in a formalism based on UML class diagrams, user specifies a class of entities (a taxonomy) that he intends to use into this environment. Then, he builds a concrete space arrangement by instanciating these classes. This step is the domain description. (2) Then he defines scenarios for this space arrangement, through a set of rules that can be described with this sentence: "when some state is observed in the environment, do some action". We illustrate this approach in the case study section.

The taxonomy defines the various classes of entities that are involved in an environment. A class describes a category of entities, with a set of characteristics (properties) and functionalities (method interfaces) common to these entities. Properties are an abstraction of the context in which the environment is defined. They are of three kinds: constant properties, that describe a context that does not evolve over time, volatile properties, that represent the context provided by external interactions (e.g temperature sensing), and write properties, that represent the context that changes according to internal interactions (i.e. method calls). Method interfaces are abstract representations of entity functionalities (e.g. move on a Camera). These methods have a signature, which includes the declaration of the write properties on which they have effects. Their implementation is delegated to the target platform of Pantagruel (DiaGen).