REST is simple, but it’s well defined and not an excuse for implementing web services as half-assed web sites because “they’re the same.” Unfortunately, until now the main REST reference was chapter five of Roy Fielding’s 2000 Ph.D. dissertation, which is a good read for a Ph.D. dissertation, but leaves most of the real-world questions unanswered.That’s because it presents REST not as an architecture but as a way of judging architectures. The term “RESTful” is like the term “object-oriented.” A language, a framework, or an application may be designed in an object-oriented way, but that doesn’t make its architecture the object-oriented architecture. (Leonard Richardson & Sam Ruby,2007)

Yes , from the statement above we can see that the idea of REST is based on a dissertation . And this one i quoteed from it :

Representational State Transfer (REST)

This chapter introduces and elaborates the Representational State Transfer (REST) architectural style for distributed hypermedia systems, describing the software engineering principles guiding REST and the interaction constraints chosen to retain those principles, while contrasting them to the constraints of other architectural styles. REST is a hybrid style derived from several of the network-based architectural styles described in Chapter 3 and combined with additional constraints that define a uniform connector interface. The software architecture framework of Chapter 1 is used to define the architectural elements of REST and examine sample process, connector, and data views of prototypical architectures.

Read the dissertation online : http://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/pubs/dissertation/top.htm

PDF : http://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/pubs/dissertation/fielding_dissertation.pdf