What is Commonscience?
Commonscience is building GitHub for Science: version control, provenance, and review for scientific work, the way Git and GitHub gave that to code. GUIDE, Composer, and Scilence are the clients and tools built on that foundation — not the foundation itself.
The comparison is direct: Git is the underlying model for versioning code, and GitHub (and clients like VS Code) are how people actually work with it day to day. Commonscience is designed around the equivalent for science — a way to version, diff, branch, merge, review, and cite scientific work — with GUIDE designed to be the first client built for it. See GitHub for Science for the full framing.
Underneath any client, Commonscience is designed around a single model: everything is an entity, and every change to an entity is designed to produce a provenance event. That's what makes version, diff, and audit-trail behavior possible across products rather than being rebuilt per feature. See the entity model.
The interface layer is Scilence, an open, MIT-licensed design system: tokens and framework-agnostic primitives that give every Commonscience product a consistent, scientific-UI-aware interface without hand-tuned one-off styling.
GUIDE is designed to be Commonscience's ELN/LIMS client — the electronic lab notebook and laboratory information management system, the way VS Code is a client for Git. Composer is a whiteboard client for keeping chemistry meaningful. More clients are expected over time; this page will list them as they exist.