Fault Detection, Isolation and Recovery (FDIR) are becoming increasingly indispensable for real-time systems. Active diagnosis systems, therefore, are endeavoring to increase the reliability of real-time systems by computing at run-time the diagnostic information within FDIR systems, to actively decide on recovery actions.

For embedded systems that contain various components, especially those including sensors and actuators, it is essential to provide a platform in which these components are able to communicate and also serve for an active diagnosis system.

This paper proposes the ADISTES ontology (Active Diagnosis based on Semantic Web Technologies for Distributed Embedded Real-Time Systems) for an active diagnosis system of sensors and actuators.

The proposed ADISTES ontology is a general ontology that can be used by different cases and systems to integrate their sensors and actuators; it can be instantiated from heterogeneous sources. As a characteristic of ontologies, they provide information in a machine interpretable format. Hence, the ADISTES ontology can also play a role for different sensors and actuators to share and communicate their status with one another.