The document discusses heap data structures, which are specialized binary trees used to implement priority queues. Heaps have the properties that a parent node's value is always greater than or equal to its children's values (for max heaps) or less than or equal (for min heaps). The key operations on heaps are insertion and deletion of elements, which require pushing nodes up or down the tree to maintain the ordering property. Heaps enable efficient implementations of priority queue operations and are used in algorithms like Dijkstra's and Prim's algorithms.