Nowadays, geospatial data management and handling facilities are supposed to break existing silos, address new audiences, and meet challenges of increased data variety, velocity and volume. A next generation of (digital) science and supporting e-infrastructures has to emerge in order to provide the required capabilities and capacities, including service interoperability, transparency, repeatability of experiments and reproducibility of scientific findings. This paper calls for a 'Digital Earth Laboratory' as a means to exploit the major challenges, share observations, experiments and their results, and facilitate collaboration in an open environment. We particularly (i) argue for a European focus, building on initiatives such as INSPIRE, GEOSS and Copernicus; (ii) sketch the early development status; and (iii) post major questions which will have to be addressed for a stepwise realization of our proposal. ; JRC.H.6-Digital Earth and Reference Data