In recent years model theorists have been studying various sheaf-theoretic notions as they apply to model theory. For quite a while however, a sheaf of structures was considered to be just a local homeomorphism between topological spaces such that each stalk Sx = p−1(x) is a model-theoretic structure and such that certain maps are continuous. Some of the model-theoretic work done with this notion of a sheaf of structures are the papers by Carson [2] and Macintyre [7]. Soon came the idea of considering a sheaf of structures not just as a collection of structures glued together in some continuous way, but rather as some sort of generalized structure. A significant model-theoretic study of sheaves in this new sense became possible only after the development of the theory of topoi. As F.W. Lawvere pointed out in [6], this represents the advance of mathematics (in our case the advance of model theory) from metaphysics to dialectics.
A topos is the rather ingenious evolution of the notion of a Grothendieck topos [13]. It provides us with the idea that an object of a topos (e.g. the topos of sheaves over a topological space) may be thought of as a generalized set. Furthermore, all first-order logical operations have an interpretation in a topos, hence we may talk about generalized structures. Angus Macintyre suggested that some of his model-theoretic results about sheaves of structures may be understood better and perhaps simplified by doing model theory inside a topos of sheaves.