Well, here is the difference in terminology.
Active suspension is like the Bose system developed many moons ago which replaces the standard spring/dampener with electromagnetic hydraulic ram's which make adjustments every millisecond.
With that said, suspension which can adjust on it's own, could also be considered "active" because it's making adjustments as the bike is in motion. In this context, a Semi-active version would be one with pre-set guidelines and electronic adjusting dampeners. The user inputing data before riding based on the conditions they see.
So the Ducati and Yamaha systems are nearly identical from their tech sheets. Funny enough, both use Öhlins dampeners, so there is absolutely a good amount of evidence there. What separates these newer systems from the older one's is the addition of accelerometers on the chassis AND on the suspension components themselves, which can send data back to the ECU which then interprets it and makes the changes. In professional racing they use potentiometers to achieve this task, but they are hard to deal with on street bikes and extremely fragile. The use of accelerometers is very clever and since Skyhook was introduced on the Multistrada, it's turned the whole chassis tuning world upside down. The changes can be made almost instantaneously and the results are very dramatic. No, it can't adapt quick enough when there is a spike like a pot hole, it's not that fast. But it will adapt when it feels a bumpy surface or when it feels hard breaking with the front end. It is self-aware and it is adapting, it's just not quite fast enough to make it fully-active.
