Situation: I’m completing a master’s degree in computer science. Currently, I’m at the final stage and finishing writing my thesis.
Usually, similar theses in my institute have the following structure:
- Introduction.
- Literature survey.
- Proposed solution, method, framework, ...
- Implementation and case studies.
- Conclusion.
Problem: Actually, the research problem that I’m undertaking is a little complicated and crosses multiple landscapes; it’s about designing data warehouses using ontology. So the way I have followed is bottom-up, providing a chapter of foundations before the solution chapter (point 3 above). These foundations contain multiple basic definitions, constraints and rules that I build upon in the next chapter (including some novel theoretical issues), in order to give the reader the sufficient tools to launch reading my work.
However, my supervisor told me that this is not the best way, and that reader may be confused with all this much of theoretical knowledge in a bottom up fashion, that may lead to getting lost. Instead, he suggested to define any concept only whenever I need to use it, even if it this concept is proposed by me.
Question: Though I know that there may be no specific answer. However, in such a situation, which is better? bottom up or top down? Any suggestions?