It's not really REST if there's no link in sight. Why not just call it a HTTP API or a Webservice?
Formatted summary - http://www.ics.uci.edu/%7Efielding/pubs/dissertation/rest_ar... - "The most frequent form of request semantics is that of retrieving a representation of a resource (e.g., the "GET" method in HTTP), which can often be cached for later reuse."
A critique of HTTP REST - http://cafe.elharo.com/web/why-rest-failed/ - "Representational State Transfer (REST) is the explicit architecture of HTTP and the World Wide Web" which is a notably incorrect statement.
Other interesting articles:
http://www.artima.com/lejava/articles/why_put_and_delete.htm...
User {
name: "Bob"
id: 1
}
User {
name: "Bob"
href: "http://www.example.com/api/users/1"
}