I posted a question over on the DevNet community (maybe I should have done it here?). In any case, I'm trying to update just the AP name and mapLocation strings as a first step and I can't get a basic PUT operation to complete successfully.
Based on the documentation that I've read through you're wanting to update the locationHierarchy field, and I don't see that documented in the API anywhere, so it appears to not be updateable via the API. But I'm very interested in doing this exact same thing so I'd appreciate hearing if you make any progress in this direction.
Edit: ugh, I just noticed that this original posting was over 2 years old. Probably not much chance of getting a response at this point...