Gordon, the purpose of translating the notes is to generate a machine readable form of the laboratory record. So for instance Peter Murray-Rust has converted a synthetic chemistry thesis to enable computational rendering of the overall synthetic schemes, details of the reactions, products, inputs, conditions etc.

This ultimately will allow people to ask questions like 'Do Ugi reactions done with amine X work in THF?'

There is also the benefit of precisions. It is one thing to say that 'you need to be a scientist to read another scientist's work books' but in practice most scientists can't read any other scientists work books. Abstracting a little to a controlled vocabulary (and then presenting it in a nice formatted manner) can actually make things more comprehensible to humans as well as computers.