Sheaves are the canonical data structure for sensor integration

A sensor integration framework should be sufficiently general to accurately represent all information sources, and also be able to summarize information in a faithful way that emphasizes important, actionable features. Few approaches adequately address these two discordant requirements. The purpose of this expository paper is to explain why sheaves are the canonical data structure for sensor integration and how the mathematics of sheaves satisfies our two requirements. We outline some of the powerful inferential tools that are not available to other representational frameworks.