G'day TorontoJim,

I'm unclear on the actual process flow. Here's a couple of suggestions; although, I'm uncertain if either of these is actually what you want.

A webpage I visit often is "Australian Government - Bureau of Meteorology". Information, such as the current temperature, is refreshed automatically. If you "View Page Source" and search for "refresh", you'll find examples of AJAX code that may be useful.

Take a look at "HTML: 4.2.5.3. Pragma directives" and follow the "Refresh" link. That has a couple of examples of how to automatically refresh pages.

I'm wondering how you were planning to inform users that data had actually changed. Would they notice if data in one table cell was modified? "Best Nodes" and similar pages on this site, notify users when the next update is due; however, the page does not automatically refresh — perhaps a similar message on your webpage would be useful (if it advised when the last change occurred). Without any idea of what your actual webpage looks like, I can't really be more helpful than that (and, perhaps, that's not a helpful suggestion at all).