  The notions of bounded expansion and nowhere denseness not only offer robust
and general definitions of uniform sparseness of graphs, they also describe the
tractability boundary for several important algorithmic questions. In this
paper we study two structural properties of these graph classes that are of
particular importance in this context, namely the property of having bounded
generalized coloring numbers and the property of being uniformly quasi-wide. We
provide experimental evaluations of several algorithms that approximate these
parameters on real-world graphs. On the theoretical side, we provide a new
algorithm for uniform quasi-wideness with polynomial size guarantees in graph
classes of bounded expansion and show a lower bound indicating that the
guarantees of this algorithm are close to optimal in graph classes with fixed
excluded minor.
