Changing Material Class

I've been doing some material managing between different renderers and have some useful tools for propagating mass changes to materials when needed.

One thing I need to deal with often are renderers that don't support material Class X so I want to change any instances of that to the supported Material Class Y.

I know many of the shader settings don't map across but for now what will be doing is capturing basics like diffuse color and various bitmaps from the original material then after conversion of the material class, transferring the captured data.

My only roadblock right now is understanding how to change the material class, say from 'Standardmaterial ()' to 'Arch___Design__mi ()'

Thanks,

j-me