Higher categories as data structures Still wading through higher category theory. I find the subject a bit intimidating, not so much for technical reasons, but because I lack sufficient intuition as to the motivation(s)/heuristics one should use a particular definition instead of another one.
The plethora of formal  possibilities is so great that I would love to have a road map of sorts (such as: if you want to do this, follow this choice, if you wanna do that, here is the menu) 
I do know that there are motivations, for instance in the context of abstract homotopy theory, abstract quantum field theory, etc. 
But I wonder:

from a DATA MODELING's standpoint,
  is there any research geared toward
  using higher cats as advanced data
  structures?

After all, graphs and ordinary 1-dim cats are extremely useful in this respect, so it seems to me that their higher version should also play a big role. 
Any good refs,  thoughts? 
CODA: The ideal situation I have in mind would be something like a nice handbook,  titled
--- higher categories for the working computer scientist--
or
---higher categories  for the working data modeler---. 
 A: There is research which you can find by a web search on "higher categories and concurrency". The basic intuition is that handling many computers for example accessing databases you can regard each as having it's own time, so we are dealing with $n$-dimensional time. 
You can also search on "double categories and data structures". 
My own research has been in using (strict) double and higher groupoids  in homotopy theory. This gets round the old problem that double groups are abelian groups; double groupoids are surprisingly complicated, and are in a sense "more nonabelian" than groups. 
A: There is work on higher categories and rewriting theory. This considers higher categories as a way of encoding the resolutions of a theory which may itself be of a class of categories. The relevant names are Burroni, Metayer, Lafont, Malbos, Guiraud, so look them up and checkout their preprints etc. 
A: There is the recent applied category theory work of David Spivak: http://math.mit.edu/~dspivak/informatics/
Particularly, his work on simplicial databases may be of interest to you.
