Software distributions released to the CPAN include a META.json or,
for older distributions, META.yml, which describes the distribution,
its contents, and the requirements for building and installing the
distribution. The data structure stored in the META.json  file is
described in CPAN::Meta::Spec.

CPAN::Meta provides a simple class to represent this distribution
metadata (or distmeta), along with some helpful methods for
interrogating that data.

WWW: http://search.cpan.org/dist/CPAN-Meta/