E-businesses are increasingly looking towards data mining systems for meeting their business intelligence needs. However, the current state of the art in data mining does not allow any one system to be able to meet the diverse business intelligence needs of e-businesses. A second bottleneck is the high initial cost involved in establishing data mining infrastructure within an organization. In this paper, we propose the concept of a federated data mining system hosted by an Application Service Provider (ASP) as a means of alleviating the bottlenecks of high cost and diverse data mining needs. We also present an XML DTD, which provides the basis for data mining systems to describe their services and architecture to the rest of the federation.